[Steve Roberts]

Pulldown only needs to be removed if the footage is 24P (24fps, with pulldown added in-camera) or 24 fps film that has been telecine’d to video.

As for fields, if the material is interlaced, try lower. Then alt-double-click on the footage in the Project window, and in the resulting window, step through the footage with the pageDn key. If the footage jerks back and forth, you picked the wrong field order, and you need to re-interpret the footage (file>interpret footage>main).

[Steve Roberts]

Ah. My assumption, as always, Dave, is that we’re talking cuts-only in FCP. No effects, or otherwise mussin’.

… and my reason 5, which is most compelling:
“5. You expect to lose the original file at some point.” 🙂

Regarding the Duck, I’m not at the Duckbox right now. Anybody? Wes?

[Steve Roberts]

Thanks for the keying info, Dave.

But … I was under the impression that a self-contained FCP export, in a sequence with no rendering, just creates a new file with no recompression, if you deselect “recompress all frames”. In the case of intraframe-compressed files, with access to all discrete frames, isn’t this so …?

https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_export_files.html
key phrase: “The quality and contents of the reference and self-contained movie are identical.”

…?

[Steve Roberts]

Yep, Photo-JPEG at about 89-90% quality works well. Also try “8-bit uncompressed”. There used to be issues with ProRes and AE, but i thought they were fixed. Hmph.

Oftentimes, the best option is to do this:
1. export from FCP using the current sequence settings (i.e. no changes)
2. render in AE to the same codec as the FCP sequence
3. import into FCP, and drop into the sequence with no rendering necessary there

Otherwise, if you render in AE to Animation (or whatever non-FCP-sequence codec you want), FCP would have to render that clip to match the sequence settings anyway. Right?

As for your keys, to keep them clean, you need to shoot in something better than DV — that’s where you have to watch the quality: at the camera, right? Now, you can try the keyer from DVgarage — I hear it’s good.

But, if I shoot DV and edit DV, I render DV.

Regarding interlacing, it works like this with interlaced clips:
– if you want to move/scale/blur/distort the clip, you need to separate fields (interpret footage). I’ve never keyed interlaced footage, but I’d imagine you should separate fields for keying as well. Hm. Anybody?
– if you want to render with fields, you have to choose to do so in the Render Settings in the Render Queue.

[Steve Roberts]

Good question. It probably converts to RGB in the color-management stage. If I were at the CS3 station, I could confirm your suspicions.

“So what good are ya, Steve?” 🙂

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

I’m wrong, sorry Amit. It can import CMYK.

Use common practices and settings for users of both Photoshop and After Effects, which share color management workflows. CMYK files can be imported and are color managed.

[Steve Roberts]

OpenGL isn’t well-implemented in AE, and it can cause problems. Most pros switch off OpenGL in AE, so you’re not missing anything.

[Steve Roberts]

Nope.

[Steve Roberts]

Yep, I bill per job as well, and specify the number of revisions covered in the estimate.

I don’t also list line items, unless they’re something like third-party DVD duplication.

Render time is not an issue lately (8-core!), so I only factor it in if it’s onerous, or if it’s a rush job. But it’s not a line item.

You may get more info by searching the Business or Broadcast Design COW forums for “render” or “rendering”.

[Steve Roberts]

One way to do the group rotation thing is to take a null, and apply the Slider effect. Try setting it to 5. Make sure the anchor point of the star layer is at the center of the circle. Then you make an expression for the star layer’s rotation that’s something like “index*slider”, where “slider” is the value of the slider you just made. Then you dupe the star layer a number of times. Each dupe will rotate a bit more than the previous one, since the index of the layer affects how much it rotates. Tweak the slider to make everything work out.

Now in your case, maybe you could animate the slider value from 0 to whatever.

Then you take that circle of stars and precomp it, then rotate it. It might work for you, or somebody may have a simpler solution …