[kami]

Hello

I've got a few questions concerning the Maxwell and After Effects (or Animation in General).

Is there a better way to change the speed of a video except for the time remapping? This kind of looks a bit wavy (it creates a wavy feeling that in some parts it is faster and in other slower, like a mix of slow and fast, is that even understandable? )

What do you do with the noise if you mix still images with animated parts? I do have an animation sequence where it stops at a certain point (stopped with time remap in after effects) and then continues a few seconds later. at the moment this looks a bit weird, because the noise is stopping too. I'm still in preview mode with a not very high SL but even with a higher SL I will have a bit of noise in the sequence which does not disturb me (except for the stop of the noise which feels like your computer having crashed ...)

Thanks a lot!
Kami

[Mihai]

I'm not sure how much noise reduction would help in your case, so the noise is almost unnoticeable, or you could try just rendering that particular still frame for a longer period of time so it doesn't show any noise.

If by time remapping you mean making it slow motion, I think you have no other choice but to change the frame rate in your main 3d app to say 60fps or even 120fps, exporting those MXS files, rendering them, then when you import and play back the rendered frames at 24fps, you'll get slowmotion. Otherwise you'll have to rely on those plugins that try to interpolate between frames which as you found can start making artifacts if pushed too far.

[kami]

Hi Mihai
Thanks very much for your reply.
Both solutions tend to increase the render time a lot and leave you much more unflexible to later adjustments.
For example I was not sure how long the client wanted the pause to be in the end. And it was likely that he would have liked the speed slightly adjusted in the end.
For the stopping part, I ended up adding a slight grain in after effects which is hardly noticeable but works nicely.
For the speed part I'll try twixtor (http://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/) the next time I'm be forced to make speed adjustements after the final render.
Cheers
Kami

[Nasok]

Hey kami.

So the waviness in animation is usually due to interpolation of keyframes in your 3D animation software .. for example .. by default Maya puts keys with soft tangents in other words all keys are "easy ease" so they are not linear .. so it ends up like a little sold down in the beginning afterwards it speeds up and it slows down before the next key. ) Easy ease So what you can do is to remove unnecessary ky and do your motion with fewer keys but just play with the animation curve instead .. or you can make those keys linear so the speed will be constant between the keys.

About your noise question - yup that's the case but .. as you know we always trying to make our images .. just a bit less than perfect .. so they would not look 100 percent perfect .. sometimes we intentionally adding imperfectness to make it more "life like" so in many cases we are adding some noise or grain … and in after effects you have a bunch of tools for adding those. There is also tool to "match the grain" ..

So in your case what I would do - is analyze the amount and type of grain in animated parts and I would create adjustment layer on top of still parts of your animation and add noise/grain to it - customize it (match the speed, color, sharpness, graininess, color tint etc) and I think you're good to go

By the way if you don't want to use external plugins for time re-mapping in AE you should switch your frame blending to "pixel motion" type - it will give you a bit better result in blending between frames when you're slowing things down.

Cheers,
Tim.