Awesome work here man. I’ve got a plethora of questions! I was wondering if there was a way that I would be able to talk to you more directly.

Let’s chat! And have a great one!

Rock out!

Yeah I suppose you’re right. I’m one of the blessed ones. I not only have a broadcast monitor, I’m also working in Australia (PAL instead of NTSC).

So not only do I work natively in my target res, but even if I wasn’t:

1. In PAL square pixels means 768 (or 1024) x 576, for a native 720 x 576. So the stretching is horizontal rather than vertical and hence, has no impact on fields.

2. We never ever have to deal with pull down unless its for something that comes from the states anyway.

We just run our film cameras at 25fps, or just play back 24fps at 25. Sooo much easier…

Sorry to gloat; and I’ll retract my earlier statements for NSTC users. But what I said holds for PAL people. It simply wouldn’t make sense to work that way.

-Steve.

Keep up the good work…

Both of those are fair arguments, but here’s the reasons. Firstly, working at 540 allows you to work in square pixels when you don’t have the luxury of having a broadcast monitor attached to your workstation which is the case in 99% of all design shops i’ve ever worked in which completely outweighs the resampling that will need to happen to eventually get to 486. Resampling definitely happens but after having done this for over 12 years i’ve never had it be a problem, and depending on the content I sometimes find myself softening my final output to make it more film-like. Secondly, the reason you can’t always just do a stretch in the output module is because if you are introducing pulldown or interlacing on output, AE’s order of operations is such that it is done in before the stretching and therefore it stretches the interlacing which is definitely a problem.

-Lloyd

Why on earth would you mess around with using animation presets when you could just create an output module setting with a “stretch to” setting?

Or perhaps more pertinently, why work at 540 and stretch to 486 if you know your output is going to be one or the other in the first place? All you’re doing is running the risk of introducing resampling artifacts (not to mention processing overhead) into your workflow if it’s so easily avoidable.

Anywho… you’re scripts are awesome, keep up the awesome work. Enjoy the beer.
S.