[Walter Soyka]

[Heather Crank] “So, for output, I would render once using alpha only (for alpha), and render once using rbg only (for the clip), then what settings do I use to render out the the clip matte?”

Correct on both counts.

There is no specific setting for you to use to render the wipe matte. You’ll need to design a separate animation, related to your main animation, that controls the transition.

For example, if your clip is a round logo that grows out from the center of the screen, you’d want the matte animation to follow the general shape. Let the matte start in all white (so all pixels in the transition are on the outgoing clip in FCP), and grow a black circle until it fills the screen (thus transitioning in the incoming clip in FCP).

In other words, the clip and alpha are used to show the animation you’re designing over the transition point in FCP, and the wipe matte is used to control the transition under your animation from one clip to the next.

It might be easier to show than to tell. Download Apple’s free Alpha Transition pack and take a look at the movies.

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]

[Dave LaRonde] “I’d bet every camcorder made in the last 20 years uses assemble edits on the tape, and not insert edits. Thus, the camera records over such things as control track and time code.”

I agree, especially with digital formats like DV and HDV, which record a data stream to tape. They don’t have “proper” separate timecode tracks.

In fact, pre-striping a tape before recording could actually cause fits for the editor if there’s any discontinuity in recording and if the tape runs at a slightly different speed in the camera than it did in the deck that striped it. It would leave timecode breaks of only a couple frames, which would be maddening during capture. Not that this ever happened to me…

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]

[Gerardo Flores] “the HP ( the new one ) is running in 1600 x 1000”

This is the problem. The native resolution for your panel is 1920×1200. Because the display has to upscale the image, it’s fuzzy.

Set the display resolution to 1920×1200 and it should be nice and sharp.

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]

[Heather Crank] “I’m being asked to render out an ae file with 3 files for each animation: Clip, Alpha and Matte…this is for fcp 7. I know how to export an alpha only files…but how do I export for a Clip and Matte???”

This is for an alpha transition in FCP, where you can create a custom wipe with an image.

Clip is the image that you’ll see on screen during the wipe. It’s RGB from AE, or RGBA with straight alpha.

Alpha is the transparency channel for the clip. If you don’t include it in the clip itself, you can include a grayscale alpha channel separately here.

Matte refers to the wipe. Any pixel that is white will show the outgoing clip of the transition, and any pixel that is black will show the incoming clip. Gray areas are mixed. Your transition should start in all white and end in all black.

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]

Are you running the display at its native resolution (probably 1920×1200)?

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]

[Leo Lagerwall] “everyone who bought an iMac and are going to use After Effects have to disable the opengl support when using After effects”

I recommend that everyone disables Open GL support. It has a couple limitations I consider show-stoppers. From the Render with OpenGL page in the documentation:

Important: Because not all features of a composition can be rendered with OpenGL—and because some features that can be rendered with OpenGL are rendered with different results—you may only want to use OpenGL rendering to accelerate previews and to provide faster rendering for non-final results.

Note: You cannot use the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature while also using OpenGL to render RAM previews or render for final output. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature works by using background processes on multiple CPU processor cores to render frames.

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]

So disable OpenGL. You won’t miss it.

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]

Nick — looking good, and congratulations on your recognitions.

Now I’ve got a feel for the Game Station as a place where all kinds of video games come together. I could easily see this as the idea that kicks off a larger campaign.

Please drop me a line sometime if you freelance with AE or C4D at walter at keenlive.com. I’d love to have you in my address book when the need arises.

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 would track and stabilize in HD to give the tracker more pixels to work with, then I would reposition and down-scale the stabilized footage to fit in the SD frame. Since you’re going from HD to SD, unless the camera shake is very bad, you may never need to scale up.

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]

[mathm mason] “i want to add time in and time out for an effect on AFTER EFFECTS CS5”

I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re asking for, but it sounds like you’re interested in changing an effect over time. This is one of the basic fundamentals of After Effects, so if you’re new to the application, check out Todd Kopriva’s blog entry Getting started with After Effects.

Apologies if I’ve misunderstood!

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