[Tobias Andersen]

I’m doing a travel map showing the route of on a map – sort of like Indiana Jones 🙂

I have a red line following the roads on the map, but sometimes the line moves up into the air when flying with an airplane. Furthermore I have city names appearing at various places. What I wanted to do was to create a transition in AE of these city names, so that they enter the scene in a cool way. But then we have the described problem that sometimes the route occludes the names and sometimes the other way around. Maybe I can just do some masking, but then I’d want to permanently remove the occluded parts of the city name and do the transition effect afterwards. I don’t know yet if that is possible, but I think I’ll manage do get the effect I want in some way.

Any other suggestions are welcome though. It’s nice of you spending time helping me here 🙂

[Tobias Andersen]

Yeah exactly, that’s what I have.

I did them in two seperate passes because I wanted to make a transition effect in After Effects when one of the objects appears in the scene. Right now I made the second object just pop in, I thought I could do a cool transition in AE, but that’s perhaps not as easy as I thought..

[Tobias Andersen]

I have read the links but it doesn’t really explain much about how to use it, it’s more general about the depth information. I have made zpic files and extracted the depth – that works fine and I can get the depth information when clicking at specific points etc., but how to continue from there? I’d also prefer to use the grayscale images if possible.

I’m sorry if I have misunderstood or overlooked something in the articles but it’s not too clear to me 🙂

[Tobias Andersen]

I see it is useful for depth of field etc and applying effects taking depth into account. Perhaps what I’m looking for is not possible.. I have two objects A and B in two separate passes and sometimes object A is in front of B and sometimes the other way. Isn’t it possible to composite those two correctly? If I do it inside Softimage with its composite tool I use a Zcomp node and plug in the two passes and their corresponding depth – then it outputs the correct result.

[Tobias Andersen]

Not sure if I can see what you mean – won’t I lose the depth information if I just use them as mattes? I guess I need to use some sort of depth matte?

[Tobias Andersen]

Thanks for your replies.

It seems like the articles you refer to talks about extracting the depth value from a rendered sequence if the depth is rendered into a .zpic file in the same directory as the .pic files. I think I can get this to work, but I actually had the two depth passes rendered out to .pic files as simple grayscale images.

Is this possible to use in After Effects or do I need to render the depth from Softimage as .zpic files?

[Tobias Andersen]

By the way – I couldn’t find my HDMI cable to connect the camera to my TV, so I just used the component cable. This shouldn’t make any difference regarding 24p vs 60i right?
Might be a silly question but I just wanted to be sure 🙂

And what frame rate would you think is best for filming animals? At close range/zoomed in.

[Tobias Andersen]

I tried recording some small clips in 24p and 60i mode, and the 24p clips looked quite a lot less smooth than 60i. It was quite difficult for me to spot a clear difference (besides the smoothness). I couldn’t really spot the “movie feel”.. so maybe I should go with 60i.

Actually it surprised me a bit how jagged it looked since I didn’t think about this issue when I watched my movie from last year – but I was also careful not to pan too fast when I shot it. I might have to do some more testing.

My TV is a Pioneer plasma (720p, 7th generation or something – can’t recall exact model name), it should be a nice display to view 24p material due to some 72hz thing – i’m not so much into the details about that 🙂

[Tobias Andersen]

Thanks for your input. I think I read somewhere that the HF10 records 24p as 60i in some way.. it sounds a bit odd though.

I guess I can figure out these things and test different settings when I get home to edit the movie. I know that I can get a nice result – last years movie had a very impressive quality.

Nevertheless, yes, it will mostly be scenery I will shoot – aswell as the wildlife 🙂 Going to a bear trip where I am hopefully gonna get some nice bear footage.

I think I will try out the two frame rate settings and plug in the camera directly to my TV and see how it looks now. It should playback with the right frame rates if I try do this right?