HD in AE
Friday, November 12, 2004 at 1:56AM The thrills never end — today’s offering is a couple of additions to your interpretation rules.txt file in After Effects to support Varicam and Sony HDV footge at their native frame dimensions.
Panasonic Varicam footage is actually stored on tape at 960x720 with a 1.33:1 pixel aspect ratio. Final Cut Pro HD therefore works at this reolution when editing native Varicam. If you want to use this material in AE, the following two lines will auto-identify the footage and set it to the correct pixel aspect:
# Varicam exported from FCP is 960x720
960, 720, *, *, * = 1280/960/”Varicam”, *, *, *
The Sony HDV 1080 spec is 1440x1080 with that same 1.33:1 pixel aspect. The following two lines interpret this correctly and assume the footage is interlaced:
# Sony HDV is 1440x1080
1440, 1080, *, *, * = 1280/960/”Sony HDV”, U, *, *
I don’t have an HDV cam, but I played around with some samples by converting them to Quicktime using MPEG Streamclip. Thanks to Tim Sassoon for the tip on that one.
Reader Comments (4)
MPEG Streamclip is indeed a great conversion (and display) utility. Now that it has AAC support, it seems to take any kind of MPEG2 or Transport Stream I can throw at it. I'm trying to support that developer as much as I can...
--jcburns
HI.
I'm a little confused about this interpretation rule. If it interprets the correct pixel aspect and creates a 1280x720 setup for the footage. should it then be able to be added to a square pixel 1280x720 comp?
Most of my Varicam gets natively recognised as 1280x720 and 1.33 ratio. But if I interpret it as square it fits all my square 1280 comps perfectly. Am I doing anything badly in this case? is it a weird conversion that might "break" my compositing?
Thanks for your time and the great book recommendations Stu, that AE studio Techniques is a winner.
Dale McCready
http://homepage.mac.com/dalemccready
Hi Dale,
The rule is designed for (and should only intercept) footage that's at the native pixel size of these HD streams. That size is 960x720. Many codecs expand this out to 1280 for you, but Varicam material edited in FCP is stored at this native size, and I build these rules for a friend who was cutting native DVCPROHD in FCP and exporting TIFF sequences to AE for color correction.
It's always better to avoid scaling your footage up and down if possible, and yet many workflows make it hard to avoid this when working with subsampled HD.
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