HD in AE

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.

Mack Row

A couple of Macros I created for Digital Fusion have been posted to eyeon’s new Macro page.

The flexibility of the Macro architecture is a big part of the success of Shake. I hope Fusion can gain a similar following.

And of course I’d love it if After Effects gained Macro functionality someday!

Monkey Movies

I am interviewed in a cool new book on guerilla fillmaking by Genevieve Jolliffe and Chris Jones:

The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook

We talked about my short film The Last Birthday Card, and using simple digital effects to increase your options and production values when the dime is tight.

(The link above is to the new American edition. There’s also the original UK edition)

HDR Color Picker Concept

I had this idea a while back for a way to represent an HDR color swatch. The concept should be fairly self-explanetory based on the below movie. Basically, a soft-edged black vignette is multiplied with the user's selected color in linear floating-point color space. As you can see, this makes it easy to see what color you've selected, even when that color is “unseeable,” i.e. whiter than white. How “crushed” the vignette becomes gives an intuitive sense of how overbright the color is.



An RGB picker is shown here for simplicty, but obviously this would work with any color selection model.







This movie was created in Adobe After Effects 6.5, using eLin.