Terrified of AE workflow

the best lossless codec for quicktime is the Animation codec. You can cut between QT Animation AE exports and original footage seemlessly if you want to. The files will be pretty big, but thats the nature of the business.

Sorry, I can't help you with the aspect ratio question... that's a weak spot of mine as well, haha.
 
(Quote) Ever try to make a vignette in Vegas? It looks like a preschooler got a hold of the program.(Unquote)

I don't know what you're doing but to get a vignette in Vegas this is what I do...(from another post I did)

For the vignettes you open a new video track above your footage in Vegas, click on Insert - Generated Media, select Sony Color Gradient, then on Preset click Elliptical Transparent to black. Now click on the number 2 in the black circle and move the vertical slider down to change the opacity of the vignette, keep moving the 1 and 2 around and play with the opacity until you get something you like.
 
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What camera are you recording with? What aspect pixel aspect ratio is it (i.e. 1.5,1.33 ect). What resolution are your files (i.e. 1440x1280). THIS WILL SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM: Render out of vegas at a square pixel format like 1280 by 720 and make sure your pixels are set to square (1.0). When you render a dvd to a 16 by 9 widescreen it changes the pixel ratio again so that's what's screwing you up.

BTW
I just did a vignette that looks perfect. It took all of five seconds and I did it the same way you would in after effects. Just drew a circle mask around a clip then applied feathering. Don't even need two layers do it.
 
Pixel aspect ratio (PAR) is dependant on your source, of course. The most common are DV (DVCPRO) which is 0.9. DVCPROHD is 1.5. HDV is 1.0 (square), widescreen/anamorphic DV is 1.33. When working with DV/SD footage I tend to work in 0.9 PAR all the way through the process. With HD I will generally work 1.0/square since the delivery methods vary. I hardly ever work in anamorphic DV anymore since shooting HD, but I treat it the same as DV, i.e., stay in it's native PAR.

For Quicktime codecs, I use either Animation or Quicktime PNG. Both are pretty much visually lossless and both support alpha channels. Animation is definately the heavier duty of the two, but it's a beast of a codec. Recently, since upgrading to FCS2, we've been using ProRes422 around the office, which by all means is one of the best codecs I've used. Small file sizes and no visual loss in quality. Doesn't support an alpha out of AE (from what I can tell) but it's a good delivery codec to the edit.

Recently, I've been putting together a rough workflow and I think it will be based heavily upon OpenEXR image sequences. OpenEXR is lossless, can support alpha channels (and many more on top of that) and the file sizes are incredibly small. But, working with image sequences means you need to stay on top of things like frame rate and PAR going between apps since it's not embedded into the file. I usually use it mostly for 3D renders only.

I've never used Vegas for CC, but AE is very powerful when it comes to CC. Levels and curvers are all you need, maybe the occasional Hue/Saturation here and there.
 
Haha, I knew I'd get in trouble with that vignette comment. I don't know, it just seems like you have more control over the vignette in AE. In Vegas it looks kind of cheap. It seems like with AE you have more control over the feathering properties and can spread the vignette out a bit. But who knows, maybe it's my imagination.

Josh, I shot on an HV20 at 1080 24p. Let me know where to look to find the other information and I can fill you in.

I've learned a lot from everybody's responses so far and feel like I'm further along which is exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks.
 
If you shot 1080 24p then you need to export it as a 1920x1080 square pixels (1.0) Quicktime in the Animation codec or, if you can, an image sequence like OpenEXR, TIFF's, or TGA's.
 
Okay, so of course I encountered a new problem. When I exported 2 minutes of my movie in the Quicktime animation format, Vegas stopped at about 20% through and said it couldn't complete the render because of an error. After some trial and error (basically just shrinking the amount of footage I was exporting until it finally worked) I *believe* it's because Windows cannot create a file over [something like] 4 gigs. So it stops rendering. Anybody out there who creates files over 4 gigs routinely? How do you get past this problem?
 
are you outputting to an external hard drive, i get the 4 gig limit with these but not if i export to my internal hd
 
Internal hard drive. But I think it has something to do with FAT32 vs. NTFS hard drives. One of them has that limit, the other doesn't. Or something like that. I can never remember. A minor rant here - Why can't AE just tell you that's the problem? I'm just lucky to have experienced this problem in other areas but for those who haven't, there is absolutely no way for them to know what's wrong. It's as simple as a warning box that says, "file sized limited to 4GB on this drive". That's it!

Anyway, my two ways around the problem are to export a series of chunks as opposed to the whole thing. That keeps the file sizes manageable. Also, I exported a Quicktime movie with the JPEG 2000 codec, which seems to bring the file size way down. I don't know anything about this codec, but I heard others mention using JPEG animation as an option. Let me know if the quality degradation is too severe to continue using this option (I will be going out to DVD so it would be nice if it looked as good as possible). Also, if anyone has a way around the 4GB problem, I'd love to hear it.
 
Matt, when it asks for the field render, it gives me options of "upper or lower" and then I have to pick a sequence under which the 3:2 pulldown will occur. I have no idea which to choose. As stated before. I shot 1080 HD on the HV20, if that helps.
 
reformat your harddrive to ntfs and you won't have a file size limit. There's no reason to have your harddrive set to FAT32 if your working in windows. You can use the program partition magic or wiki search to find out ways to do it.

AE or any other program for that matter, can't tell you how big the render is ahead of time and when it runs out of memory it could be one of many reasons.... because the harddrive is getting full or a partition is full or it could be one of many things. It's not AE's job or any other program to figure out these things out for you. The file size limit for FAT32 is talked about in every manual for AE, Vegas ect.

If your gonna take it to the next level learn basics like fat32 vs ntfs. Don't expect a program like after effects to hold your hand and explain every error. Hard to believe you have 100 hours on AE yet you don't know about something as basic as ntfs vs fat32.
 
Hmm, I have 10x that amount of time, and did not know that Josh. Probably because I have not come across that problem myself. I bypassed the boring basics myself and went straight for the fun stuff.
 
Seriously Josh, you have like a vendetta against me or something. Did I kill you in a previous life? Most people, regardless of manuals, don't really pay attention to something unless it becomes a problem. If people have been using NTFS formatted hard drives their entire lives, and thus haven't encountered that problem, how would you expect them to ever know or care about it? And do you really think it would be that difficult for a programmer to figure out that if the render stops at exactly 4 gigs... that it might be because of the file size issue?

Anyway, I get that you don't want me to learn after effects. But if you could refrain from posting on this particular topic, I'd appreciate it.
 
Since the error comes from the OS rather than AE, it can't tell you exactly what the problem is. Any error from the OS can have a slew of variables so it would be useless to tell you anyways. Either way, it's neither here nor there...

I would try Quicktime PNG. I use it a lot for previews and such and it keeps the file size down, visually lossless and supports an alpha channel. I generally don't mess around with JPEG codecs in production, but that's me. PNG is a really great alternative, IMO.

Regarding fields, HD is usually always upper.
 
Thanks infinite,

Okay, all of this stuff has been very helpful. I feel like I have a much better handle on things. I do have another question. Do you guys bring sound into After Effects? Because what I'm finding is, if I only bring in the picture, then I'd have to bring my file BACK into the original editing program (in this case Vegas), resync it up with the sound, RENDER, and output, thereby losing another generation of quality (as opposed to just being able to take it right into my DVD burning program). So how do you deal with sound when going in and out of After Effects?

Making things more complicated is that I have to work with my project in chunks (it's 30 minutes long) and therefore would have to chop up the sound with every chunk I exported. I might be answering my own question here. Should I just do a sound mix so I have one sound track, export each chunk with sound, then sync it back up on the timeline when finished? This still doesn't solve the additional render problem though.
 
I generally don't use AE for finishing so usually sound is for previews only. I would imagine if it's the last step prior to compressing for DVD, you might as well. Even though you have to chunk out your files from Vegas, you can still reassemble them into a master comp then render that out of AE to a codec like Quicktime PNG that is easier on the file sizes.

We generally assemble everything in the edit then output via Final Cut/Compressor. I don't know how it works with Vegas, but if you're using lossless codecs I wouldn't be too worried about generational loss. In most production enviroments there are at least a few generations of loss anyways and no one really notices.

A typical workflow for us when it comes to my side (graphics & animation) is to transfer from the P2 cards, export an image sequence or Quicktime out of Final Cut at a standard size (i.e. 1280x720 or 1920x1080, square pixels). I then import that into AE, do what I need to do, then output a Quicktime Animation or ProRes movie that gets dropped into the edit, then delivered to whatever medium, beta, dvd, etc... Right there you have 3 generations. All 3D is done via OpenEXR sequences, but they only go through 2 generations.
 
If you want to get past the 4gig file size limit, then I would suggest using an image sequence. If you go with an uncompressed TIFF sequence, you will see very little generation loss and bypass the file size limit.
 
I'm sorry if I offended you. I don't want to stop you from learning anything I just wanted to stress the basics that are keeping you from finding your workflow. By now you could have your 200 shot color corrected in vegas and learned a bunch about color correcting along the way. You'd use the most of the same tools like levels and curves anyway and vegas's three way corrector works great and that's something you don't have in AE.

Did you try either saving to image sequences or reformating your hard-drive to ntfs to get rid of that file size limit? How did that go. I don't might helping you man. What about quicktime set to Animation?

You do realize that rendering your footage to anything format and then bringing it in AE means you'll have to manually re-cut each 200 edits once in AE?
 
My second hard drive is NTFS, so I'm saving to that drive now. No problems. Yes, you're right. I have to manually recut everything if I output to AE and I'm starting to wonder if that's worth it. I still like the flexibility that AE gives you and feel like it has more options. But is it worth the time and the hassle? I feel like, however, that I'm missing some basic know-how on keeping this simpler than it currently is. People come into AE all the time. My question is, do they usually come in for very specific shots, or do they use it for their entire project. Cause to me the program doesn't seem built to handle large projects.
 
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