Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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Dave’s right — if you could board an express train that passes by the station, that would save you a lot of time.
But if you can’t reshoot, there’s no automatic way to even that out. You have to do it by hand, with time remapping (TR). Basically, in addition to the keyframes created by TR, you need to add keyframes where the train starts to slow down (maybe), where it stops, where it starts up again, and where it settles into steady speed.
You are now going to move most of those keys to the left, starting from the end of the clip. The last two travel together: do not change their relationship to each other. First, drag the last two to the left. Play the clip. Change the slope of the curve where the train starts to speed up so it starts pointing steeply upward, then settles into the same slope as the line between the last two keys. You are speeding up the footage a lot (steep slope), and gradually settling into the footage’s original speed (slope). Play the footage and tweak the handles until the speed is constant from 0 to final speed.
As for the stopped portion, now drag all three rightmost keys (together!) to the left (no vertical movement!) until the first of those (where the train starts moving) is one frame to the right of the keyframe where the train stops. Play it. If you see a jerk, drag the right keyframe up or down a bit. Note: there will be a jerk in the trees — ignore it. As long as the track is the same, you’re okay.
You get the idea. For the deceleration, the curve should start at the same slope as the beginning of the clip (constant speed) then gradually curve upwards until it gets to the first stop point.
If you have trouble at the stop, consider splitting the clip and doing TR for the deceleration half of the clip, then for the acceleration half of the clip, trimming out the stop portion.
TR skills should be in every AE artist’s toolkit. This one could be worse, since there’s only one deceleration and acceleration. Imagine if the motion were jerky. Use your eyes, and if you get stuck, just disable TR and start again.
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Maybe it’s safe, but I’d say it’s pirated, with somebody else’s serial number. At best.
I wouldn’t buy it.
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Yeah, #1 sounds good. I might let FCP render it in the sequence, then export it using the sequence settings and re-import into FCP just to have it on hand as an HDV clip. I’d only do this if the clip were long, and to avoid re-rendering in the FCP sequence if you move the clip around, or whatever. But that may not be necessary in your case.
I’ve heard mixed reviews of AE’s rendering to interframe (temporally) compressed formats such as MPEG-2. Some people have problems, some don’t.
Anybody else?
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[Darby Edelen] “I can add to this that if your footage moves very quickly you should sync your refresh rate with the frame rate.”
Now that’s clever!
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Yeh, 1920×1200 is an accepted computer resolution nowadays. Since it’s just playing on a computer, and it’s not tape/broadcast video, that’s cool.
I’ve just looked into this (Googling “tearing” “monitor” and “30 fps”) and read that tearing happens when the video card tries to display frames faster than the monitor can show them. The solution may be to find a monitor with a faster refresh rate or slow down the 30 fps frame rate to 24.
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Indeed.
4/5 of 30fps = 24 fps
4/5 of 29.97fps = 23.976 fps exactly.Unlike FCP, AE cares very much about 23.976, and requires that we work in that exact frame rate.
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Hm. In my experience, Animation is requested by Avid editors when they think you don’t have Avid codecs on your system. However, it’s possible for the After Effects artist to download Avid codecs and render directly to them, thus avoiding Avid’s conversion of the Animation files, and making the Avid editor your new best friend. And the Avid codec files would be smaller than Animation files.
Next time, I’d ask the editor if s/he’d prefer files compressed to something other than Animation, possiblt a specific Avid codec at a specific quality (say, Meridien 2:1).
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Googling the error led to this page on Mylenium’s site:
https://www.mylenium.de/creation/motiondesign/ae_errors/ae_errors_31-40.html
Since the number and message don’t match, you may need to look around the site. Hope it helps.
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Yep. The third-party plugins are Zaxwerks 3D Warps, Conoa 3D Layer, or Forge Freeform. Download the trials if you can.
Freeform may be dead, since I don’t think it has been updated for CS3, and I haven’t seen a site update there since 2002.
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[Viktor Richardson] “Is it possible to export a vector animation to an SWF without rasterizing it if it has motion blur?”
No. Because motion blur is a raster thing in AE.