Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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2.5D was introduced in AE 5.0, and virtually unchanged since then. Except for projection lights, if I recall.
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Indeed. The key was the word “digiBeta”: the “cinema-ness” of it only mattered in design terms, not technical-delivery terms. For example, a bigger screen often means you can use smaller type (as far as resolution allows, of course) and bigger David Lean-ish vistas. You’d design differently for a little 320×240 thing on a computer.
Also know that many people use “anamorphic” incorrectly. Technically, it only applies to film, not video. Video uses the term “widescreen”.
Next time, ask if Pearl & Dean is delivering the spot. They have specs for UK cinema adverts that you need to know. Especially pay attention (and confirm) to their audio specs.
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[Dave LaRonde] “Nope, it wouldn’t help. “
… because when you compressed the footage before importing into AE, you made it look worse. AE would then open the ugly file and render it to Animation (a lossless codec) making a big, ugly file instead of a big, pretty file.
Okay, maybe not ugly, but degraded, and certainly no smaller.
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You should use NTFS for your drives.
However, if you regularly interface with Mac people with some drives, those drives need to be FAT for cross-platform access.
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Ditto on not using AE for compressing, except with the Flip4mac plugin for WMVs. After rendering to Anim, I use Compressor for MPEG-2, and QT Pro for H.264/MP4. For now, anyway.
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Try Trapcode’s Shine plugin.
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It’s not an effect, just compositing. And it requires careful setup.
If you don’t expect one shot of you to overlap with any other, you just shoot each one (with you standing in very specific positions, locked down camera), drag ’em all into a comp and draw a rectangular mask around each shot to cut out the excess.
Now if you expect overlap, you need to shoot on well-lit, saturated greenscreen so you can cut out the background behind each shot of yourself. Drag those into a comp, key out the green for all shots except the guy in the back maybe.
If you don’t shoot on greenscreen, you need to roto, which means draw a moving mask with the pen tool around yourself for each shot. It’s as painful as it sounds, especially for the length of a song. Use greenscreen and key.
But do a quick test first, so you nail down the problems before setting up the instruments and doing the whole song.
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It may be fine if you are using a separate music track and want to output audio in the final movie. No need to worry about demuxing or killing audio in the Output Module or Export settings — just kill the speakers for the video layers.
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… and you probably need to get a 3D matchmoving solution such as Syntheyes to track the stick so you can move the CG racquet within a Maya scene. Then render the moving racquet in Maya.
AE’s role in this would be to composite the rendered Maya movie over the original footage.
Check Syntheyes’ website (ssontech) for more info … you may need to ask them how this could be done.
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… because Quicktime Player doesn’t “see” transparency.