[Zach Fine]

Interesting — does the TimeWarp filter with Pixel Motion not internally deal with interlacing?

I just handled this process in a way that seemed fairly intuitive with some 29.97 stock footage that I needed to use in a 23.976 comp.

• dropped the 29.97 footage into my 23.976 timeline.
• set AfterEffects’s interpretation settings for the 29.97 footage to conform it at 23.976 (result: no skipped frames in the timeline, but it’s running at 80% speed).
• In the timeline I applied the TimeWarp effect to the footage and set it to play back at 125% speed with ‘Vector Detail’ 20 and Filtering ‘Extreme’.

This looks pretty much perfect as far as I can tell. But I may have gotten lucky in that the stock footage appears to be progressive.

[Zach Fine]

In case anyone’s keeping track, DPX with alpha is still not supported as of DaVinci Resolve v12.1.0.015. I just received a bunch of such sequences, and they open just fine in AfterEffects CC 2015, but show up as the red exclamation frame in Resolve.

[Zach Fine]

The fact that there’s even debate over whether this technique should be used, and where one draws the line between pure editing and vfx, oh this brings me back…

A similar question popped up one of my first times in editorial on a “big” feature. The director and editor were watching a two shot with locked camera, and the director thought one actor’s reaction to the other’s line was a few frames slower than his liking. He asked if it might be possible to split the shot down the middle and pull up the late reaction on the right side by a few frames. I had some compositing experience, and in my mind I saw this as a very simple task, but since I was the low man on the totem pole and was still learning both the politics of the editing room and the degree to which editorial needed to be risk-averse in order to keep things sane, I kept my mouth shut. The editor and first assistant editor quickly disabused the director of his idea, explaining to him that such an invisible (as opposed to stylized Woodstock-ish) split-screen would turn the shot into a VFX shot and add a ton of complication and expense. The clip played in the film with the late reaction, as shot.

Fast-forward less than a year and I was brought in on a different big feature whose director’s cut was nearly complete. I took one look at the timeline and saw a very different level of creative flexibility at work. Split-screen edits were everywhere, well over a hundred in all. Nearly every locked-off two-shot had had one side’s timing adjusted, or featured one side from a completely different take. The effect was seamless, perfect.

Which brings me to morphing. Within the past few months I’ve worked on films in which morphing has been one of many techniques used to transparently adjust the timing of a take, hiding jump cuts in a performance. In the case of one editor, s/he used a simple and quick cross-dissolve transition to bridge the time jump, along with a reposition of the clips so that they’d perfectly line up through the transition. In the case of another editor, Avid FluidMorph transitions were scattered throughout the timeline to bridge these time gaps. In all cases the editor had a hunch that the effect might be possible, tried it, and if there was visible artifacting s/he would remove the effect and give up on the idea or pass it along to me to try more involved solutions. All would eventually become VFX shots for finishing since these projects were to be conformed as DPX sequences, though if we were working on television programs that were to be onlined in Media Composer many of the effects would have worked just fine as-is.

I think it’s worth asking whether to use such techniques in a feature given that in a sense they’re changing the actors’ performances (a counterargument would be that we change the nature of performances all the time just by cutting and that this isn’t so different), and I’d definitely be very wary of using this technique for a news piece as I wouldn’t want to give the interviewee fodder for accusing me of having altered their words, and in any case it’s worth skipping the effect if the result happens to look distracting, but there’s no question that morphs and other invisible time cuts have definitely become part of the modern editorial toolkit.

——
FWIW, I found my way to this thread because I was looking to see if After Effects had a simple and automatic equivalent to the Avid FluidMorph effect. That timewarp on adjustment layer trick sounds like it’s worth a try.

[Zach Fine]

Same exact problem here, on a new Mac Pro 8-core with D700. I wanted to shout at it “Who cares about initializing audio hardware — the footage I’m going to deal with today is all MOS!”, but they haven’t built Siri into MC yet.

[Zach Fine]

Thanks so much for this tip. I had the exact same problem in FCP7 just now, and switching the gamma correction to “Approximate” fixed the issue. Switching it back to “Accurate” just reintroduced the problem, so I’m sticking with “Approximate” for now.