[Steve Roberts]

You need to play the sound by hitting the . button on the numeric keypad or by making a RAM preview. Don’t hit the spacebar. Check the Help for “preview”.

By the way, avoid MP3s. Use Quicktime to convert them to AIFF or WAV.

[Steve Roberts]

Got a still of the comp window and timeline, showing masks and keyframes?

[Steve Roberts]

That would work, if going to something other than DV tape is the goal.

[Steve Roberts]

If all you want is progressive, not interlaced, why 24P? Why not 30P?

With 30P, you’d just need to use Fieldskit, and there’s no likelihood of strange little distortions when Twixtor tries to interpolate between frames when going from 30 to 24.

[Steve Roberts]

DV is not a nice codec, especially for graphics.

I generally do this:

1. cut for timing in FCP, using raw footage or placeholders in the same codec as the footage.
2. export the clips to be processed in AE, at current settings.
3. in AE, work the magic and render to the codec used by the FCP sequence, in your case, DV.
4. in FCP, drop the effected clips into the timeline and export using current settings.

Now then. This requires testing: you might get a better result if you work in AE in a 16-bit project, then render to 10-bit uncompressed. Then FCP would recompress to DV, but the AE work would have been done in AE in a better color space. Depending on what you’re doing, you could get a slightly better look.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

If it was shot 60i, you should not go to a 23.976 (24p) timeline. If you want the speed of the action to stay the same (of course you do) you need to create new frames, new images.

Before you had (basically) 30 images playing per second, but in 24p you have (basically) 24 images playing per second. The images in-between have to be created. It’s like saying you have a ball rolling across the screen in 1/6 of a second. At 30fps, you’d see 5 images of the ball. But at 24 fps, you’d see 4 images of the ball — at different places in the framecompared to the 30fps footage. So you see, the actual images are different between the two frame rates.

The only way to create those intermediate frames, to my knowledge, is to use something like Twixtor to generate those frames. Alternately, Timewarp in AE might work, but I haven’t tried it. Sometimes those effects work well.

I recommend you take the interlaced footage and interpret it Lower field first so you have 29.97 fps footage, but progressive. Don’t change the frame rate to 24 (23.976) — it’s not worth it. Or you could use FieldsKit to remove the interlacing more intelligently. Then you make your new footage 29.97, no fields. Save the 23.976 stuff for all-new projects.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

Select the imported footage in the Project window, then File>interpret footage>main. Set it to loop there.

[Steve Roberts]

Unlike editing apps, After Effects always recompresses.

Rendering to the Animation codec will preserve the current quality of the DV with no further loss due to recompression. If this clip is then going to be compressed to MPEG-2 (or whatever) right from AE, this is a good option.

However, if you plan to bring the Animation clip into a DV timeline in an editing app, the editing app will recompress it to DV to match the DV sequence settings. If you had rendered the clip to DV in AE, the editing app would not recompress it. So. If you are finishing to DV in an editing app, you will have to recompress it one way or the other.

[Steve Roberts]

Oops — sorry, I forgot it was for a demo reel. For some reason, I thought it was a school thing.

Yeah, don’t take it from DVDs. Makes you look bad.

[Steve Roberts]

Did you check out the script I mentioned?