After Effects, ProRes, and Gamma Shifts

Adobe’s yeoman After Effects documentation guru Todd Kopriva maintains a highly useful blog over on Adobe.com.

Today he just posted instructions on how to modify the After Effects CS4 QuickTime gamma rules XML file (did you even know such a thing existed?) to allow proper round-tripping using ProRes4444 without getting those gamma shifts that cause many of us to rip our hair out.

The post also includes links on how to make ProRes 422 roundtrip, and general background information on gamma shifts and After Effects.

Unsafe Areas

Two of the more intriguing new features in After Effects CS4 (and other members of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 family) are updated pixel aspect ratios, and the ability to display 4:3 “center cut” safe area guides inside 16:9 widescreen compositions. I applaud both. But as I work with them more, I realize there are some slight errors in where the safe area guides are being drawn, particularly in light of the new pixel aspect ratios. First I’ll cover the relatively minor 4:3 case, and then move on to the far more egregious 16:9 case. 

NAB Tuesday: Getting Plugged In

Noise is everywhere in Vegas. Slot machines are mostly just noise, and everywhere there is loud music - we heard U2 at the breakfast buffet, AC/DC in the hotel restroom, and even the popcorn street vendor on the corner aimed his radio at the crowds walking past while a live band played across the square from him. Every party and event had loud music to create “ambience”, even when the attendees secretly (and not so secretly) wished the music was literally ambient music. The end result is that your voice is shot by the end of the day, making it near impossible to hold a normal conversation (let alone give a presentation the next day).

This year, the only peace and quiet you could find in Vegas was on the show floor. Gone are the days when you could only reach the Adobe booth in the South Hall by jostling through the gauntlet of what was the Apple and Avid booths, both trying to drown out each other from different sides of the aisle. If you were a golfer, you could have practiced your putting on many of the aisles this year - although Tuesday did feel busier than Monday and vendors at the Plug-in Pavilion reported a busy morning. We were among those hanging out, and here’s what we saw:

NAB Monday: Best of Times; Worst of Times

NAB this year is certainly a cross between the best of times (catching up with friends and seeing cool new toys) and the worst of times (the horrendous economy casting a pall around the halls). We’ve been in Las Vegas since Friday night, and teaching a few sessions at the Post Production World conference in the North Hall. So it was nice to finish up our sessions Monday morning and hit the show floor. Word has it that attendance is down from 107,000 last year to just 80,000 this year. You can tell its down because you don’t need binoculars to see Peder Norbby demo Particular 2 at the Red Giant booth in the Plug-in Pavilion (more on that, and other plug-ins, tomorrow). But first, what we saw and heard on Monday:

Autodesk+RED Workflow Guide

The RED One camera and its ability to capture large frame size, RAW-format files has certainly ignited the imagination of filmmakers and videographers. But its unusual file format and requirements has also created a lot of head-scratching among users trying to find the most efficient way to send RED footage through a normal production pipeline.

To this end, Autodesk just released a white paper that covers using RED One footage with their Smoke, Inferno, Flame, Flint, and Lustre systems. It covers shooting, lighting, color spaces, proxies, going from offline to online, audio, finishing and final output including suggested settings, as well as an appendix on RED-specific applications and where they fit into the workflow. In other words, this isn’t a brochure; it’s a mini-handbook for users that describes the current recommended practices in some detail.

You can download the white paper here. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of some of its suggestions:

Adobe will support RED

Sorry for the short post, but I know this is news many of us have been waiting to hear (and sooner than some of us thought):

“Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects.” On both Mac and Windows.

This is not a rumor; this is the real deal.

Here is the thread on Reduser.net.

Leaving Los Angeles

The reason we haven’t been posting up here for the past couple of weeks is because we’ve been packing up our home/office/studio and putting it into storage while we buy a new home in the East Mountains section of Albuquerque, just down the Turquoise Trail from Santa Fe. There are many reasons we’re undergoing this major life change, several of which we’ll be elaborating upon in the upcoming weeks and months. If you’re curious, here’s a few of the reasons why:

Compression Artifacts & Pulldown

This started as a quick post about how to gain finer control over the compression settings in the QuickTime dialog. But before we can get there, we first need to talk talk about how 3:2 pulldown works. (Trust me; it all ties together; it was also a good little mystery.)

I recently gave a training session at a local studio, and at the end they were invited to trot out their Barney Stumpers (questions about why something went wrong, how something works, etc.). For one stumper, a user had some footage with 3:2 pulldown, and after pulldown was removed, he noticed that an after-image of the previous frame appeared in the next frame after an edit. Why?

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