[Walter Soyka]

I agree with Ted on ProRes.

There are a important notes about using ProRes with After Effects, depending on which version of AE you are running. Check out Todd Kopriva’s blog entries:

• ProRes 422 colors in After Effects (CS3-CS4)
• ProRes 4444 colors and gamma shift when working with AE and FCP (CS3-CS4)
• ProRes 4444 and ProRes 422 in After Effects CS5

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Mitch Noakes] “how much storage space will I need for say an hour of HD footage?”

Check out the AJA Data Rate Calculator. Like you said, it depends on the format.

[Mitch Noakes] “I’m not sure which one my camera will be shooting in. I think it is H.264, because I read an article saying that this type of video, which the my camera shoots in, needs to be compressed to MPEG2 format to edit in Final Cut. Do you guys know of any good sites/posts that give really good explanations on the differences of the different video formats?”

h264 should be transcoded to ProRes for FCP editorial. If you take an hour or two to read through a couple days’ worth of threads on the COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro forum and check out Shane Ross’s Tapeless Workflow with FCP 7, you will find a lot of great background information and save yourself many headaches.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Richard Herd] “Value proposition, does it work from both ends?”

You offer your customers some unique benefits through your products and services in exchange for money. They don’t necessarily offer you any unique value back — that’s what the money is for.

[Richard Herd] “ME: here’s the video but the audio file I received is poor.
CLIENT: here’s the new audio
ME: here’s the 2nd video.
CLIENT: My bad, I gave you the wrong information.
ME: I can fix that but it’ll cost X I’ll do it for half.
CLIENT: Complain complain complain.

Please help me here with regard to the value proposition. My price is already a bit low.”

The way I read that exchange, it seems that you are telling your client that you are both flexible and low-cost. That’s not necessarily a bad business model, but it’s certainly inviting for grinders, and it’s easy to get flooded with projects with low price tags and high expectations. If you don’t want to be known as the flexible, low-cost provider, how would you like to be known? Does that idea match up with your clients’ and prospects’ needs? Do your words and actions reinforce or undermine that idea?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Roberts] “Thanks Tobi and Walter for mentioning Playback Pro — it looks terrific.”

Steve, Playback Pro is fantastic. I work on a lot of live events, and we’re seeing PBP replace DDRs like the Grass Valley Turbo. It’s cheaper, faster, more reliable, and more flexible. If you do any live playback, it’s absolutely worth having in your toolkit.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I absolutely agree with Dave — I doubt this can be done automatically and effectively. You really don’t make any editorial decisions, just purely random cuts on the beats?

Another alternative method for marking the beats is hitting the period key on the numeric keypad to start an audio preview, then tapping the asterisk key on the numeric keypad to add markers to the composition. It’s easy to snap items on the timeline to the markers.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[jeanne hilary] “I am intrigued by your advice to send the project back to FCP–I learned elsewhere not to do this because FCP compression is murder on AE files.”

Like Dave said, this totally depends on your sequence preset. I do all my work in ProRes to keep quality high and file sizes down.

[jeanne hilary] “But someone else told me it has to go back to FCP in order to output an mpeg-2–intuitively this doesn’t seem to make sense.”

Well, you could use FCP > Compressor to get MPEG-2. In many workflows, AE is not the final step; you are usually creating assets in AE that will be used in editorial. For effects, I roundtrip from FCP to AE, then back to FCP.

[jeanne hilary] “The other is that I noticed that there is about a 3 second difference in my quicktime file (a total of 11 minutes) between FCP and AE. Inconvenient, and how can this be possible?”

It shouldn’t be. Are you sure everything matches and that you haven’t accidentally clipped off the beginning or end of one of the clips somewhere along the line? What exactly is your workflow, step by step?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Every royalty-free license I’ve ever seen specifically excludes re-distribution of the raw assets. You might be able to negotiate a special license, but I’d expect that would cost some serious money.

I think you’d be better off hiring a designer to do these for you, or maybe even doing one of your lessons on how to make animated lower thirds and giving away the output.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Combs] “Is there anyway of preventing layers to intersect through each other. I know it’ll probably look weird to have some layers end abruptly, but no more so than having a postcard with seven corners peeking through.”

You can break AE’s 3D space by putting a 2D layer in between two 3D layers. Most people do this by accident, then wonder why 3D doesn’t work. If you do it on purpose, you might get the look you’re going for.

Simply insert an adjustment layer in between the 3D layers where you want to break proper intersection.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

We’ve been through this before, and not all that long ago. I suspect that many of us who are now threatened by the current disruption were the beneficiaries of the last disruption.

In 1995, Sony introduced a Flip Cam — but they called it the VX1000. It arguably wasn’t as good as Betacam, but it wasn’t nearly as large, and it was cheaper.

In 1999, Apple introduced a Flip Editor — but they called it Final Cut Pro. It arguable wasn’t as good as Avid, but it didn’t require a qualified system, and it was cheaper.

When you mix technology and capitalism, you get better quality from smaller, cheaper, faster packages every time.

This thread is one of a series on this forum over the past couple weeks that I think all distill to the same idea: knowing your value proposition, and being able to communicate it to clients and prospects who would truly benefit from it.

If all the value you offer comes from the tools that you own, you had better be a rental shop or you’ll be out of business.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Roberts] “I’ve found that Quicktime has to think, check its BlackBerry and call its mother before it goes back to the first frame of a loop.”

Absolutely — that’s why hinting all the tracks in a looping movie is critical. I’ve also had success making RAM disks to play media from. Disk seek and access doesn’t get much faster than that!

Tobi, I saw you mentioned Playback Pro — it’s a great app, and I’d certainly prefer that for live playback over Quicktime Player.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events