CMG Keyframes

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we’ve written a brain dump on where those funky frame rates came from, and issues to watch out for as you get assets from 3D artists, stock footage libraries, film composers, and even well-meaning camera or tape operators that have frame rates that might be just slightly off from what you expect - and how to correct them.

Click here to download a 212 KB PDF of “Frame Rate Follies” from Artbeats.com.

Fellow PVC writer Mark Christiansen also recently wrote a piece for Artbeats’ NAB 2008 Show Guide on creating ramping speed effects in After Effects; click here to download the 1.1 MB PDF. In a similar vein, we also wrote an article for Artbeats on using the same underlying technique to bend the time of a clip to match a soundtrack; click here to download the 2.3 MB PDF of it.

By the way, Artbeats has a monthly email newsletter which contains links to each of our articles for them as they are released, plus a link for registered users to download a free full-size clip every month. Click here to register.

During the Post|Production World conference that ran alongside NAB 2008, I gave an extended session on audio connections, microphones, and other related issues. At the end, the attendees hit me with their individual problems. I thought the questions and their answers might be useful to others, so I decided to add them to the archives up here, amended with additional thoughts and research I’ve gathered since returning from NAB.

Note that essential companion reading to these comments include my previous article on audio wiring and connections, plus my blog on dealing with ground loop hum.

So what’s so interesting about a feature we’ve had for eons? We all know you can copy and paste vector paths from Illustrator to After Effects as mask paths and motion paths (you did know that, right?). But with the new Shape Layers in After Effects CS3, you may run into a little snag when trying to paste paths to shapes.

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we’ve written an introduction to using Color Management in After Effects CS3, covering input, output, monitoring, and the Project Working Space. It was written in the context of how to handle Artbeats stock footage in a job, but the basic principles apply to a wide variety of jobs. You can download the 884 kb PDF by clicking here.

By the way, Artbeats has a monthly email newsletter which contains links to each of our articles for them as they are released, plus a link for registered users to download a free full-size clip every month. Click here to register. To see the full list of articles we (and others) have written for Artbeats, click here.

No matter which workflow you choose, always make sure your source footage has been tagged with its true pixel aspect ratio - this is the only way your software will know what to do with it in order to keep you out of trouble.

For a variety of arcane technical reasons (trying to record NTSC and PAL on the same tape, cutting corner on data throughput, being compromised by camera sensor technology of yesteryear, etc.), virtually all digital video formats have non-square pixels. This means they must be projected in a way that stretches or squashes them on playback to properly fill the television screen. Unfortunately, a side effect of this is that they will also look odd on a computer screen. When all you do is send the digital signal from camera to tape deck to switcher to monitor, this is neatly hidden from you. But when you start working with digital video inside a computer, you have to deal with these misshapen pixels.

As a result, a common question is what is the best way to work with these pixels: Stretch them back out to being square? Or leave them in their native format? The answer depends on what your primary goal is in life: preserving maximum image quality, or preserving your own sanity.

Motion 3 - part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 suite - has experienced a major update, including the addition of motion tracking and stabilization, optical flow (smooth slow motion) technology, a gorgeous particle-based paint system, enhancements to their Keyframe Editor, and interesting new Audio Parameter and Retiming behaviors. But the big headliner is the addition of 3D space - including 3D animation for 2D layers, 3D cameras and lights, and 3D enhancements for their particle and text animation systems.