[William Meese]

Wow, I didn’t expect an answer straight from the horse. Since this is a purchase for a client, I feel more confident going with the Intensity card. Not really possible to test the HDMI beforehand, which is why I’m asking if anybody’s doing that.
Thanks for the response!

[William Meese]

Thanks, Vince.
This is a small webcast studio in one room (10′ x 10′) of the client’s offices. No other production is planned, and the budget is tight. I’m considering fluorescents to keep the power needs and heat down.
Good tip on the muslin–I just looked at a similar setup that used plain, dark drapes as bkg–gave some texture yet didn’t compete with foreground.

[William Meese]

Overwhelmed is good. Congratulations, you’re stretching yourself – you’ll learn more than usual on this gig.
Do what Grinner says: Go through the footage, pull the juicy selects. By then some concept/theme/story/treatment will have percolated up to conscious thought. Attack, using your selects. When you get stuck, either technically or conceptually, try reviewing the NG / non-juicy footage for alternatives and new ideas.
Be open to chucking everything and starting over (but save that sequence).

[William Meese]

Hm. Pixels is pixels, and if the dimensions were correct, whatever PAR was flagged for the animation shouldn’t matter to Avid. The import settings do matter, though. The good news: when your editor gets back, if Avid’s import settings properly match AE’s export settings, it should import okay, though slower, without artifacts. Let us know.

[William Meese]

Did your editor try re-importing as I suggested? Did the problem go away?
You only answered one of Carl’s questions – end product is DVD – so I can’t answer yours.
You usually want to have this kind of info up front, before doing any rendering. Frame rate, field order, dimensions, codec, RGB vs 601 levels, audio specs, etc. What’s your editor saying? What does she need?

[William Meese]

“…we see a distortion every third of the screen vertically.”

Two horizontal lines splitting the video into thirds? When I’ve seen this before, it’s been DV footage’s 480-pixel height unintentionally resized to D1’s 486 pixels. As Rory points out, most of Avid’s resolutions are 486. The editor can try an import setting of “maintain, nonsquare” (IIRC) to test this, but – especially if these are online renders – you want to render to the project’s resolution for best results and for “fast import” into the project.

[William Meese]

Yep, there it is. It’s probably mentioned in the manual, just ought to be in the index too.

Thanks for the fast answer, Jon — I have time to add some fades and re-render before the end of this session!

[William Meese]

Thanks for the BTW, Matte; this is my first-ever posting.