After Effects work

[Joe 90]

I'm currently working on a project using 3Ds Max and After Effects.

First time I've had to use AE so a few things I'm not great at and also the first time I've had to use Max with a background so had issues rendering without the background... you'll see what I mean...

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Anybody any good with AE?
would appreciate a few tips on how to make it look better :/

Also, I've shot in 1080i and then its required to be SD widescreen, but that comes out like this... squashed and not very wide :(

Oh, and any ideas how to make max render a scene without the background so that the next scene will hopefully render quicker.

[Joe 90]

*figured out how to get the animation to export without the background today but now can't figure out the Alpha layer in AE, just getting the clip with a black background.

Any ideas?

[Mark]

The squashed effect I can help with.

My guess would be it's the same issue that has proven to be the bane of my life when it comes to video. Most SD video formats came from the 4:3 aspect ratio era. The most common one (used by Freeview and - I think - DVD) is encoded at 720x576 resolution. This is fairly close to (though not exactly) 4:3. 16:9 is subsequently achieved using rectangular pixels. Unfortunately a lot of tools don't account for this when converting to other formats (inc. YouTube) which use square pixels.

Since YouTube now supports HD, you'd be better converting direct from the HD feed for posting there. Unfortunately if you're authoring for DVD you'll still have to use the 720x576 SD format for that.

PS - this information is all based on experience, so it may contain technical inaccuracies.