Thanks for sending the project + footage.
There are two problems:
1) One problem is that you are working in less than 100% resolution for your main comp.
There is a way around this:
Make sure when you import your footage that the AE’s Interpret Footage->Separate Fields is set to Upper.
Set AE to work at 100% resolution (and make sure to set resolution AE is using to actually calculate the images... Not the viewing display resolution).
2) It looks like getting random frames from the HDV codec you are using causes AE to go a bit crazy and will not allow us to get the frames/fields properly. So you are doing nothing wrong. It is just that AE and HDV do not play nicely together.
Here is a “Creative Cow” forum post, by someone who really knows these issues:
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/942432
The main info is this:
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following -- Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
You are using one of the formats AE does not play nice with, so you’ll need to recompress to another format before trying what you are trying in AE.
Pete
