[Walter Soyka]

As Dave and Joseph mentioned, Collapse Transformations is what you need.

I’d also point out that since AE isn’t really a 3D application, it’s pretty easy to accidentally break the 3D space in your comp. For example, if you insert a 2D layer in between 3D layers, the 3D layers won’t intersect properly. For more, see the online help page on 3D layer interactions, render order, and collapsed transformations.

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]

What did you search for? The application is not called “Final Cut Studio.” There are several component applications, and they are all located by default in the Applications folder on your startup disk (usually named Macintosh HD):

Color
Compressor
DVD Studio Pro
Final Cut Pro
Motion
Soundtrack Pro

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]

[Bob Sabiston] “Can someone please tell me how to re-render my composition to a movie, the same way as I have just done? It is the commonest thing I can imagine wanting to do in AE yet I never have found out how. I render a movie out to quicktime, say Sorenson3 format, change the stretch scale to something, turn on audio, pick a filename, etc. Render it. See a mistake. Fix the mistake, then… “

Ted’s instructions on how to duplicate items in your render sequence are correct.

I’d suggest, though, that you encode to a lossless format (like Quicktime Animation at 100%, or Quicktime PNG) and use a third-party encoder (like Telestream Episode, Sorenson Squeeze, or Apple Compressor) to create your compressed deliverables. The AE render queue is not capable of multi-pass encoding, which improves compression efficiency and reduces artifacts.

Sorenson 3 is quite outdated now, and is considered a legacy codec; unless you have a specific requirement for Sorenson 3, you should be able to get much better results in a smaller file with the h.264 codec. If you must deliver Sorenson 3, I’d look at Sorenson Squeeze, which includes the Sorenson 3 professional compressor — a huge quality improvement over the (free) Sorenson 3 Basic encoder included with Quicktime.

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]

If you’re asking for technical advice, we’ll need a lot more information about your system and your requirements. Please let us know what the specs on your MacBook are, describe a bit about the videos you’re working on, and let us know where you’re getting hung up in your workflow.

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]

[Kelton Corc] “I need to move forward, and want to know how to do it. I am on a budget, being a kid, and I want to get the cheapest, yet best upgrade to make better videos.”

What does “better” mean to you? What do you want to improve about your current work?

Fancy hardware doesn’t necessarily make for better videos. If there’s a specific technical problem you need to overcome, then fancy hardware helps, but the best hardware in the world will not make better videos by itself.

[Kelton Corc] “I’m a young editor (14) and I want to keep pushing my skills for career options in the future.”

You’ve got an early start, and that’s great. You can focus on learning storytelling with what you’ve got now, and worry about getting more gear later.

Watch the classics. Study them. Analyze what decisions the filmmakers made, and try to figure out why they made them. Listen to director’s commentaries. Learn a little film history.

Expose yourself to art forms unrelated to film. With respect to creativity, you are what you eat, and having broad exposure to the arts will give you greater resources to draw upon. Paintings, music, sculptures, architecture, dance — all have something direct to offer (color, melody, composition, rhythm) that can actually make you a better editor.

Keep making videos. Ask for critiques, and learn from the feedback. Get other people involved in your projects, and get yourself involved in other peoples’. This is a team sport, and being a good collaborator will get you recommendations when you’re working.

I see far too many people who only want to learn to push the buttons. They regurgitate the effect of the week that they learned from a free tutorial on the Internet — but without really learning the underlying techniques, or how they convey thoughts or emotions. These are not the people I want working for me. If you can buck that trend by becoming a true storyteller and a creative collaborator, you’ll have an outstanding foundation for a great career.

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]

To be a little more helpful, from the Supported import formats page of the manual:

Note: Some MPEG data formats are stored in container formats with filename extensions that are not recognized by After Effects; examples include .vob and .mod. In some cases, you can import these files into After Effects after changing the filename extension to one of the recognized filename extensions. Because of variations in implementation in these container formats, compatibility is not guaranteed.

Also, AE doesn’t work well with temporally compressed media like MPEG2, and it doesn’t encode temporally compressed media like MPEG4 very well, either.

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]

If ripping DVDs is a nail, After Effects is a screwdriver. If you need to drive nails, use a hammer.

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]

[Aza Allen] “Basically my picture is a black and white image of roses, so I am trying to get each petal of the roses to fall into place to create a transition, and I’m using shatter to make that happen. Now I know mosaic would give me random color, but I would like to color each petal randomly… does anyone know how to make this happen? “

This would take seconds to do manually in Photoshop. Choose a color, then fill a region with the paint bucket. Repeat as necessary.

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]

[doug nash] “But it’s a little tough to resolve, being that my average animation project takes up about 300-400 gigs. You’ve got to spend a great deal of money to get a tape back-up capable of those capacities.”

That’s exactly why I’m still eyeing them. The tapes are cheap enough — around $50 for 800GB — but the drives, controllers, and software are still pretty expensive.

[Dave LaRonde] “Not to mention a good deal of time. Tap backup is reliable, gut it’s S-L-O-W, slow! It’s one of those deals where you get it going, hit the hay and it MIGHT be cone in the morning. “

LTO4 ain’t your father’s tape backup. The uncompressed transfer speed is 120 MB/s — so it could transfer ProRes HQ at 3x real time. A lot of folks shooting tapelessly (P2, RED, etc.) are using LTO4 systems now to keep up with the the huge amounts of data they’re generating.

And the reliability you mentioned? That’s the best part! Confidence in your backups over a 30-year time frame…

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]

[Foy Watson] “I’m just getting started into After Effects CS3 and am having the most difficult time figuring out Motion Tracking. I can get the clip tracked, but I cannot get anything to actually match the footage… What I want to do is throw a blood splatter on the left side wall. I have the footage tracked, but the blood splatter plugin doesn’t conform to the wall. It “somewhat tracks,” but doesn’t stick to the wall the way I’d like. Any helps for a hopeless noob?”

AE’s built-in tracker is a pixel (or point) tracker; starting with CS4, mocha-AE, a planar tracker, is included in the AE bundle. What’s the difference? Because planar trackers track a plane in 2D space, you can follow the change in perspective through the camera move — like the wall in the shot you shared.

Motion-tracking this shot would have been a lot easier with markers on the wall in the original shot.

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