Study a Shot like an Effects Artist

Study a Shot like an Effects Artist

Seasoned visual effects supervisors miss nothing. Fully
trained eyes do not even require two takes, although in the
highest end facilities, a shot loops for several minutes while
the team picks it apart.
This process, though occasionally hard on the ego, makes
shots look good.
You can and should scrutinize your shot just as carefully in
After Effects. Specifi cally, throughout this book I encourage
you to get in the following habits:
. Keep an eye on the Info palette

. Loop or rock and roll previews.
. Zoom in to the pixel level, especially around edges.
. Examine footage channel by channel (Chapter 5).
. Turn the Exposure control in the comp viewer up
and down to make sure everything still matches

. Assume there’s a fl aw in your shot; it’s the only way
around getting too attached to your intentions.
. Approach your project like a computer programmer
and minimize the possibility of bugs (careless errors).
Aspire to design in modules that anticipate what might
change or be tweaked.


The Trials and Tribulations of QuickTime
QuickTime is the most ubiquitous and universal
playback format among video professionals,
despite that it is proprietary. There are design decisions
behind QuickTime that don’t change unless
Apple decides to change them.
Some of these amount to a gotcha:
. Color management of QuickTime remains (at
this writing) a moving target, with MOV files
appearing differently when they are moved
from one platform, software, or even monitor,
to another. When I say “software” I even mean
Apple applications, which don’t always seem
to agree on how to display the format.
. High Quality toggle in QuickTime Player is
unchecked by default. The client is screaming
about why the shot looks fuzzy and you have
to direct them to Window > Show Movie
Properties > Video Track > Visual Settings and
the little toggle to the lower right.
. Many useful formats are Mac-only, such as
Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2, an Apple format.
. The notorious QuickTime 7.2 caused After
Effects renders to fail with a write-error.
. Failed or corrupted QuickTime files are typically
unplayable, and the larger they are, the more
susceptible they seem to be to being taken
down by a spurious frame or two.


Most larger facilities rely on QuickTime only for
client delivery and in the edit suite. It’s inconvenient
to deal with sequences when there’s no
free standalone player for them of the quality of
FrameCycler, but sequences cause fewer of these
types of problems in exchange for the overall
inconvenience.