[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

One other way to do it if you can track the camera data from your clip like Dave suggested with Syntheyes, Camera Tracker or Boujou (Voodoo can do that as well and it’s free). Then if the building permits ( if it’s a building that can be simulated with flat surfaces, cubic building blocks) you can actually build a 3d model in AE using 2d textured planes. You can actually get pretty complex with that – if you have time check my demo reel (5.1) here on the Cow. Somewhere in the middle there are a few buildings (4) morphing from one shot to another. 2 are done in with a 3d package and 2 in AE entirely and most people did not think that possible.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Create some solids the size of your comp, turn them in 3d layers and position them in 3d space as you need. Precomp each one leaving attributes in the initial comp. You can then open each and fill in a video and whatever type of frame you want. After that it’s just a matter of animating the camera and each individual “screen” to match your vision.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would duplicate the clip, crush levels to get the gray to be darker and the white to a clean bright white and use that as an alpha to composite the original back on itself. That would give you the water on one layer that can be affected by using the Hue/Saturation to colorize.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would recommend bringing everything to square pixel aspect ratio- work in a project that has a square par and resize all material to fit. This way you can make sure no distortion will appear- then render out applying a stretch ( ex- work in 768×576 and render stretched to 720×576 – PAL D1).

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

It’s a bit unclear – do you have a sequence of files (like animation, drawings, pictures) that are in tiff format? From what you mentioned it seems like there are alpha channels for these images- how are they created? And then the shadows- what format are those?
Be more specific in what you ask, give details and post stills – this will provide better feedback/answers.
Depending of your specifics there can be different answers- for example, you can assign a Matte from a color channel or from the Luminance of another layer… and so on.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

That’s really not much to do in AE – there’s a good concept and design that went in the logo, but other than that it’s just straight animation (timing is everything), floor reflection (Andrew Kramer has a few tutorials on that) and a light sweep. I would say that a good storyboard, thinking in advance how you want the logo to come in, and a good audio sound design will help also.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Depends what effects you are using – some effects react to the composition (other layers, camera move and so on). You may not get the desired final look if you render just those layers- which is the only way you can do this in AE.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

if you have motion blur set for you comp and do not have rasterize unsupported features checked, the swf file will contain only the layers without motion blur- in this case the bk.
Anyway, it’s always good to read the documentation from Adobe on this.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Maybe what you are seeing in FCP when you scale to fit is a preview and the final render will give you the full rez. Try to render out a few frames and see what happens. Still don’t understand though why you are not rendering out of AE at 720×480 if that’s all you’re gonna use…

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

It’s quite confusing because I do not understand what the actual problem is. If your final project is 720×480, then there’s no resolution loss- you bring in the higher rez files from AE and scale them down- you get better image quality. The only issue would be if you work on 720×480 for some reason and you want to scale up to HD or something af the sort. Then you would loose resolution.
Also, I do not understand (like Dave before me) why do you finish in FCP and not in AE?
Just as a rule, for fx and graphics, you should always try to work on a higher resolution and then in the end, encode your final uncompressed render from AE to the final compressed size using a compression software like Adobe Media Encoder.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist