[Walter Soyka]

Dave, thanks for the kind words!

[Dave LaRonde] “It might be for one single, long screen, but I doubt that’s how it’s going to be played back! I’m thinkin’ about 4 or 5 playback devices…and for work like that, you’ll want to press the client for WHAT YOU NEED TO DELIVER. You need specifics before you can start cutting Second One. You can’t think in normal TV Terms.”

To expand on this point a bit, you can’t make any of the assumptions that you normally do when working in broadcast. You need to find out the frame size (in pixels, knowing the aspect ratio isn’t enough); you need to find out the frame rate; these details will define your working space.

Your delivery space will probably be different than your working space. As Dave mentioned, playback will probably come from multiple devices, so you need to find out what sizes and formats you are expected to deliver.

Beyond that, there are all the design considerations; working in widescreen is a bit different than traditional broadcast frame sizes. Full-frame visuals from video or film don’t usually work unless they were shot with the wide ratio in mind, so a lot of my widescreen work is more motion graphics and compositing than editing.

Once you have some more information, we’d love to see you on the Live & Stage Events forum that Dave referred you to.

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]

It’s not just the frame size that you need to concern yourself with. You should also verify frame rate, and find out specifically what format you are expected to deliver.

All these details will be determined by the requirements of the on-site playback system.

If you are working for an event production company, they should be able to give you these details. If you are working directly for the end client, they should put you in touch with the event’s producer so you can get the information you need.

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]

[Roberto Etcheverry] “I’m looking for a way to make real time deformations and cutouts live.

Basically this is for events with giant screens, and what we’re trying to do is to grab an image (usually trough firewire), quickly deform it; like the liquify tool in photoshop, or place it on a cutout image (like those “put your head here” photos) and output it to video either trough firewire or the computer’s video out for a quick laugh.”

You should be able to do this entirely within Photoshop, if you have a video capture card in your computer. I believe both AJA and Blackmagic Design have Photoshop plugins that allow you to import a frame from the video input and output a frame to the video 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]

[Dave LaRonde] “”23.976” and “smooth motion” can very easily be mutually-exclusive terms. That’s the price you sometimes have to pay to work at a film frame rate.”

Dave makes a great point — on a film shoot, part of the DP’s job is to make sure all the camera moves will work; a pan that’s just a little too fast can distract the audience and wreck the shot. The DP will adjust the shot to achieve the director’s vision as closely as possible while avoiding technical flaws.

When creating motion graphics with virtual cameras, we have to be both the director and the DP, and in this case that means compromising a bit of motion to avoid stuttering.

Learning a bit about cinematography and applying practical production wisdom to motion graphics production can be really helpful.

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]

Here’s an Adobe document on gamma shifts; it may give you some useful information.

That aside, I’d recommend against using h264 footage in After Effects. I hope Dave LaRonde doesn’t mind if I parrot his stock answer on the topic:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

You’d be better off using a codec like DVCPRO HD or ProRes.

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]

[Aaron Cadieux] “Has anyone in here ever charged for editing on a per-minute-of-edited-video basis rather than by-the-hour?”

Perhaps I’m reading too much into your question, but it sounds like your client might be uncomfortable with open-ended hourly billing. What the client really wants is to know how much the video will cost upfront; what they don’t want is any sort of surprise, and I think this is very reasonable.

However, as the others have mentioned, finished-minute pricing doesn’t factor in the things that raise or lower the cost of production. While knowing the price tag upfront will make your client happy, you would be taking on a lot of risk in agreeing to the price based solely on finished time.

A quick analogy: I couldn’t approach a contractor and ask how it would cost to build a 2000 square foot house and expect to get any kind of reasonable answer, because square footage is not the primary driver of the cost. I also wouldn’t want him to go ahead and start building, and simply charge me as he proceeds, because I have no idea what the final price would be. Instead, we’d have to have some dialog. The contractor would ask me all sorts of questions: how many levels, what style, what grade materials, what is the site like, etc., and then have some plans drawn up and develop a quote.

I think this is a good approach for budgeting video, too: start with a dialog with your client, and then develop a script. Video is very cheap and very easy to change on paper, before production begins, but very expensive to change after production is finished.

Once your script is written out and agreed upon, you can break it down into the elements you will need to produce or acquire and budget accordingly. At the end of this process, you can tell your client what the cost to produce that script will be. They will be happy, because they’ll have a good idea what the video will cost, and you will be happy because the script limits the scope of the production, and therefore limits the risk you assume.

Of course, you’ll also need to agree with your client on how to handle changes; what might seem like a relatively small script change might have bigger cost implications than they expect, and you’ll need to work with your client to keep them well-informed as the process unfolds and the project evolves. If I wanted to add another bathroom to my house, it may seem like a very simple addition to me, but the contractor would have to run new plumbing, and the cost might be higher than I would expect.

Another possibility is that your client is looking for a price per finished minute as a way of comparing bids. This reduces production to a commodity, and isn’t really fair to you or informative to your client. Price per finished minute doesn’t reflect how the video will meet their needs. A video for a development company might benefit from a 3D rendering of the site and proposed buildings; if your proposal includes it, and your competitor’s does not, you will lose when you compete on price. You might win, though, if you compete on effectiveness.

You’re not just selling the finished video as an end product; you’re selling your service to produce it. A lot of your value will come in advising your client. You’ll be indispensable if you can work with your client to get past what they are asking (price per finished minute), determine their real underlying needs (budget or vendor selection), and address them.

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]

You can reduce that stuttering effect by using Motion Blur.

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 go into System Preferences > Displays and change the display’s resolution to a size smaller than the AE window itself, it will resize and re-locate all open windows. Change back to your regular resolution and resize as you like.

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]

AE has a built-in effect called “Audio Spectrum” that might be helpful to you.

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]

[Ryan Tweedy] “Is there a way to keep the 3d in the project and do the animation in aftereffects?”

Unfortunately, not with your current workflow. C4D and AE are well-integrated, but they are fundamentally separate applications.

If you need 3D text directly in AE, check out Zaxwerks Invigorator — it’s a plug-in that allows you to create and animate 3D objects within AE that interact with AE’s cameras and lights.

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