Editing Q&A

[desk]

I thought I'd start this thread because of a problem i've recently come across in aftereffects but it would also be a cool place for anyone to ask specific editing questions or show off some effects you've come up with.

So to my problem. I just started using adobe aftereffects and when I try to import animated gifs I always get a white background. Even when the gifs themselves have transparency. I've tried saving the gifs in different ways with index and alpha transparencies and i've tried 'interpreting' the footage in different ways after importing it to AE but with no success. I've done this a lot on other videos using premiere with no problems.

I can get around the problem to a limited degree by inverting and applying keying effects but it isn't ideal and creates more problems. So if anyone knows how to solve this I'd be hugely grateful.

thanks

[Magnetro]

I forgot how to fix that problem... I THINK it had to do with AE. I think there is something in AE that lets you enable transparency. If you can't do it any other way import a giant folder of non-animated GIF files or something =/ Sorry.

Good idea for a thread though.

I suggest reading http://www.creativecow.net it's really great (their magazine is cool, too)

[desk]

So after a very long time and much frustration I've got around the problem. I still don't know why the alpha channel doesn't seem to work but there are so many 'get around' tutorials on the net that I'm guessing it's a common complaint. Anyway, this has delayed so much of my work and finally I can start again! I used to use ghetto keying techniques to approximate an alpha channel but after some reading and slapping of my forehead there's actually an almost perfect solution. When exporting something that you want transparency on, just colour the background a nice bright colour that isn't present in the actual footage/still. Then just use the 'colour key' effect to erase it after importing into after effects. I used to try and key out black or white backgrounds which looked crappy but it never occurred to me to use this method.

anyway, I hope this helps at least 1 person, lol. And if anyone else has any editing problems feel free to use this thread.

[jchensor]

Hmm... I know I did this with the animated gif of Guile doing the Sonic HUrricane for the animated Sonic Hurricane logo in my old videos. I can't remember how I didn't the transparency, though (the project is backed up on a DVD but not on my hard drive currently). When I get a chance to look it up, I'll let you know what I did, but it looks like you got it under control anyhow.

- James

[ZenFire]

kinda sad that you still need to this oldschool stuff for such a common problem.

video compositing is something everyone needs, and yet, there´s no real software to do it all for you that doesn´t cost a lot of money. why can´t you store RGBA in video streams (or can you?), alpha channels are pretty essential after all. anyway, FF0000 00FF00 0000FF and any two of those combined make for nice key-out colors.

[desk]

well I have no problems in Premiere but for some reason after effects just won't accept the alpha channels.

jchensor, if you do find out that would be awesome thanks. It's still a bit of a hassle to have to do this for every thing I want transparency on.

[Maj]

How do Premiere and AfterEffects handle source clips of varying framerates? Cuz i'm working with a lot of different games here and the framerates are all over the place - from 29.97 to 62ish with hella different numbers in the 58 to 62 range.

What i want is to end up with a 59.94 fps video that contains all of the frames of my source clips. For the clips that are in 29.97 fps, i'm hoping that deinterlacing them will give me 59.94 fps. For the rest, i'm ok with having the video alter the game speed slightly. I prefer that to losing frames.

[desk]

after effects definately retains the frames and you can export the movie to any frame rate you want. I don't really know about premiere, if there's an option to do it then I haven't found it... so if anyone knows please post up. I always find it a annoying exporting from AE because I can never, ever find a balance between it looking good and not having a ridiculusly huge file size (4-7 gig!).

[ZenFire]

I have Premiere Elements 3.0 and those jerks at Adobe decided "hey, let's take away their ability to set their project settings to anything that is not standard. Even though the software can handle it, we dont' want our Pro users to think we're overcharging them" So I have to do weird as mathmatical tricks and settings-file hacking to get it to do what I want to. But htat's neither here nor there. Premiere takes any clips and changes them to the project's framerate, meaning that it either duplicates or decimates frames. Having different framerate sources shouldn't be a problem, I think. Though the slower ones will look less fluid and that might be weird looking.

[Maj]

Duplicating and decimating frames is exactly what i don't want. I can't believe how complicated this whole process gets. Whatever, i guess i'll just do the best i can and quit worrying about it. If i ever figure it out, i'll go back and redo it ... if i still give a shit at that point.

[Maj]

Using AfterEffects, what's the best way to reveal multiple lines of text letter by letter? I don't need typing sound effects or anything crazy like that, but do want it to appear like standard videogame dialogue.

[fullmetalross]

well you could just do it in premiere if you setup two layers one that basically just is a mask for the text layer and then move the mask slowly off screen so it reveals each letter one by one could work... If you have multiple lines split each line up into its own text layer and mask layer and then just use the keyframe feature to move it over... I haven't really used after effects but there is possibly and easier way to do it in that. You could also just put every letter on it's own layer and turn it on or off one after another but thats sort of a pain in the ass.

[desk]

there's an animation preset that does exactly that (typewriter or something, I think). It's under tools (maybe?) then something like 'apply animation'. If you have adobe bridge installed you can actually preview all the txt animations before you apply them. If not, the ghetto way would be to do exactly what FMR suggested. If I desperately needed that effect and there were no animations, that's what I'd do.

[Maj]

When you crop CvS2 clips and resize the width to 320, the height becomes 237. Now if you put this clip on top of a 320x240 black background, it looks weird every time the screen flashes a bright color. Is there any way to automatically feather the clip so that the 320x237 clip area is unaffected while the clip's actual colors bleed into the 2 pixels on top and the 1 pixel on the bottom?

[ikusat]

I am so lost with AE. I opened it up and like flailed around for 3 hours and managed to get something that would have taken me 10 minutes in premiere. I thought it was supposed to be the ohter way around!

Can anyone post some neat effects they do? There's just too many options to play around with, and they all seem to do nothing.

[fullmetalross]

Maj,

Can't you just make it so height and width don't have to match on clip? So you just manually set it to 240? I doubt the three pixel difference will look weird.

Edit: I just looked at it, and if you are using a composition in AE you can just tell it to fit the video file you are pulling from to the composition.. I tried it and it doesn't look weird at all.

[Maj]

Can anyone post some neat effects they do? There's just too many options to play around with, and they all seem to do nothing.

That question would make a pretty good thread. I don't remember the names of the ones which impressed me, but if you start the thread i'll post them up when i have a chance to look through AE tonight. A lot of those transitions scare me too, so i'm hoping other people will share their discoveries/successes as well.

Can't you just make it so height and width don't have to match on clip? So you just manually set it to 240? I doubt the three pixel difference will look weird.

Resizing works, but i was wondering if there was a way to do it without stretching the clip. It's 3 measly pixels. There's gotta be another way to fill that gap.

How does the resize algorhythm even handle such a small change? Does it redraw the colors of every vertical line? I dunno, it just seems like a waste to bother resizing when it's only 3 pixels away from the target.

[fullmetalross]

welllll
if I was gonna do it to an image in photoshop, and I didn't want to resize, I would cut off the very top 2 lines of pixels at the top and then paste them and stretch them up to fit the margins, and then same with the 1 pixel line on the bottom... I don't know if there is a way to tell AE or premiere to do that with the same area over and over again throughout the whole clip though.

[Maj]

Haven't seen anything like that in AE, but that's a pretty cool Photoshop trick. I'm sure it'll come in handy. Thanks for mentioning it.

[fullmetalross]

my question is what sort of workflow should I have between the two?

Should I make a long grouping of clips in Premiere and sink them up with effects in AE? or should I use Ae to put effects in individual clips adn then group them in premiere or is it like a go between, where you build sets toeghther like flips between two clips in ae and then move them into premiere and sink them up and then back to ae for any extra effects. I'm just scared to start working cause I don't want to get my work flow all fucked up.

[Maj]

Let's say i have three animated gifs. One is an animated background and two are animated sprites with transparency. What's the easiest way to merge them together? I want the background on the bottom, one of the sprites on the top, and the other sprite in the middle. AfterEffects is not down with gif format transparency.

my question is what sort of workflow should I have between the two?

There really isn't much you can do with Premiere that can't be done in AfterEffects. Once i learned AE, the only time i would go back to Premiere was when AE gave me an error of some sort.

For example, rendering AE compositions would start to produce errors once the compositions got long enough. So i just split up my project into several segments then glued them together in Premiere.

Also, AE gives me problems when i try to import music files. Even when i convert them from MP3 to uncompressed WAV beforehand, it still skips. It works fine in Premiere, so i just render out the composition(s) in AE and then add a soundtrack in Premiere.

Sometimes i do super-basic video editing outside of AE, but i use VirtualDub for 99% of that. Stuff like capturing, cropping, deinterlancing, once in a while resizing, etc.

[fullmetalross]

Ah thanks.


For the gif question You'll need either image ready or fireworks. I haven't messed with fireworks much, but it should be a pretty simple task to just put one on top of the other and let her rip... If it doesn't work putting one right on top of the other, you may have to import all the layers toeghther and then manual turn each one on and off during the timeline... But yeah get imageready (before cs3) or fireworks (cs3) and you can do it!

[Maj]

If there is a way to do it in ImageReady, i couldn't figure it out. Obviously you can do it frame by frame, but one of the animations had 104 frames so forget that.

Ulead GIF Animator looked promising, but the sprites needed resizing/resaving/reloading which didn't work out so great cuz the borders looked terrible after all that. At native resolution, sprites don't have fuzzy transparent borders. When you resize them, it creates kind of a white glow around them.

Fortunately, there is a way to make it work in AfterEffects. Since animated gifs use something called "binary transparency" and AE prefers alpha channel transparency, importing animated gifs normally causes them to have a solid background in AE.

The way around this is to open the animated gif in ImageReady and save it as a PSD file. Then you import the PSD file into AE as a composition. (When you import a file, there's a drop-down menu that lets you select whether you want to import it as Footage or as a Composition.) AE then creates a new folder, imports every individual frame into it, and creates the composition. But it doesn't do a very good job cuz all the layers start on the same frame. It's not an animation; it's a mashup.

Next, you delete the composition but you keep the folder with the individual layers. Select them all and drag them into the New Composition icon, which opens up a dialog box that lets you select the frame duration. When you click OK, it'll organize them into composition timeline in order, without overlap. It'll retain the transparency from the PSD layers and you can transform the scale and position of each frame. You can also put the entire composition into another timeline and transform the whole sequence as one item.

It's kind of a hassle but at least it works. By the way, the order of the layers in the composition is determined by which one you selected first. If you click on the first layer and then Shift+click on the last, it'll organize them first to last. If you click on the last layer and then Shift+click on the first, your animation will go backwards.

[Maj]

What's the best way to extract uncompressed AVI clips from very large WMV files? VirtualDub doesn't like Microsoft codecs so i tried converting the WMV footage to DivX using AlltoAvi but the audio is never fully in sync. Depending on the settings i use, the audio either plays ahead of the video, or behind, or starts off right but suddenly desyncs during a lengthy static storyboard. The program doesn't have an option for converting to uncompressed AVI either, though i'm not entirely sure that would be a good idea anyway since we're talking about a two hour video. All in all, i need to extract about 20 short clips from that video, totaling less than five minutes.

[Magnetro]

Try SUPER encoder.

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

[Maj]

Nah, that site looks too ghetto. Think i'll stick with AlltoAvi despite audio desync issues. I'll prolly end up having to mute all the source footage anyway.

[ZenFire]

For dumping something that VDub doesn't get, you can try using VLC player. It can transcode anything it can play into a multitude of formats and containers. For fine control over the comression settings, you'll want to use something else, but for uncompressed/lossless dumps, it's fine. I think you should be able to use GraphEdit too. It lets you dump anything you have a DirectShow filter for to a file on your HD, but I found it wasn't too easy to use. You could even use it to capture video, but it's pretty slow.

EDIT:
Oh yea, and of course you can use AviSynth for this too. That app is godly, or gdlk as the hip kids say.

[Dark_Chaotix]

Ill ask it here, does anyone have software that converts mp4 into like AVI or mpg? I really need one

[error1]

looking for an encoder? vdub can do it, I use megui but it's a little more complex. Encoding itself gets very complex so it would help if I knew what you need this for? In fact extensions like .mp4 or .avi don't mean much because they are just containers.

[Dark_Chaotix]

I tried opening mp4 in vdub and doesnt except it.....

Well i record from ps3 which is in a M2TS format. With the software that comes with the PVR it turns it into an mp4 video file. But you can edit it with the software so im stuck with something that I cant edit....So what to do?