[Walter Soyka]

That’s exactly how it works. You have to finalize your camera animation in C4D and then bring the render passes and camera data into AE. Once it’s there, you can work in AE as you normally would, except you can’t manipulate the camera without breaking the perspective of your renders.

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]

[Matt Sturns] “Yes, we have considered Blu-Ray but will not work in our workflow. We need to play a file from a computer to a HDMI monitor. Do you know the best way to do this via a PC?”

In general, I think that media playback at a live event from a general-purpose PC is too risky. There are plenty of reliable, purpose-built solutions. Can you tell me a little about your workflow? I might be able to suggest a safer way to meet your requirements.

[Matt Sturns] “For video cards we are looking into either the:
Grass Valley HDSPARK PCI Express Card or
Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro HDMI and Analog Editing Card – PCI Express
Also do we need additional software to output to the Panasonic TH-85PF12UK 85″ monitor.”

As you mentioned, these are video cards, not graphics cards. The plasma will not appear as a regular desktop monitor, so software like Windows Media Player or Quicktime Player will not see it. You must use the manufacturer’s software to drive the display.

[Matt Sturns] “Again we need to play a computer file (I am guessing Quicktime Pro-Res or H.264 or whatever will play best) to the Panasonic monitor.”

You’ll have to create the file in whatever format and codec Grass Valley or BMD’s software prefers for playout. You may need a RAID, too, for the disks to keep up with the video.

Another note — we always run a redundant, live backup through a switcher for media playback at events; otherwise, a computer crash can ruin your presentation.

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]

[Dan Nelson] “Changed the frame rate to 23.976 under Preferences>Import and it solved my problem.”

Just for your reference, you can also use Interpret Footage to change the frame rate on an item without re-importing.

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 might be a frame rate mismatch. Quicktime reports the frame rate of your first movie as 30 fps; the second is 29.97.

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’m not sure why you’re seeing the length mismatch, but exporting WMV directly out of AE is not the best workflow.

After Effects is not a great compression application. It’s incapable of multi-pass compression, which would generate much cleaner WMV files — less blocking, less banding, and smaller file sizes.

A better workflow is to render lossless animations from AE and bring them into a third-party compression application, like Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze, or Microsoft’s free WMV encoder.

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]

[Danilo Dumjahn] “for a live projection we need a videoplayer which has the ability to queue several videos or chapterize one long video.”

For Mac-based video playback with basic editing capability, you might look at Playback Pro — it’s an outstanding application. Pro Video Player is the other big Mac-based playback option.

[Danilo Dumjahn] “btw, i’m on a mac, there is not much budget for solutions like watchout, etc. and we got a 3840×1080 videosignal sent through a matrox triplehead2go..”

Here’s where it gets tricky. You’ve got the budget for a widescreen or multiple independent screens, but not much for proper playback? The TripleHead2Go is a great product, but it takes a beefy computer to push a 3840×1080 video. If your video is heavily compressed, you need fast processors to play it back. If it’s lightly compressed, you need a fast disk subsystem. Either way, I hope you will have a pair of well-equipped Mac Pros available for this.

Sync rolls (whether from DDRs or multiple output systems like a Watchout rig) or dual-channel DDRs are a great way to increase reliability for large format playback. We’ve used dual-channel DDRs built for stereoscopic playback to run widescreen sync rolls from a single unit with great success.

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]

Have you considered video playback from Blu-ray? It will be high-def, it will look great, and it will be plug and play easy — you won’t have to worry about your codec, video card, or computer playback capabilities.

If you have a little more budget, I’d recommend playback from a DDR (digital disk recorder; a purpose-built, computer-based playback system) like a Turbo or DoReMi. If you’re on the Mac platform, you could look at Playback Pro, an excellent piece of DDR software for high-spec machines.

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 sure it’s being interpreted at the proper frame rate? It would be shorter if it were a 23.976 fps image sequence being interpreted at 29.97 fps.

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 getting an error message on import, or does it seem to be missing frames visually? If the latter, how are you confirming it’s every fourth frame? Are you using the same frame rate throughout your project?

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 is normally quite good about working with image sequences. We’ll need a lot more information to help diagnose the problem.

How were the files made? Are the filenames perfectly consistent? Is there anything different about the frames it’s skipping? Any disk permission issues? Can you open the skipped frames in Photoshop?

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