Tron-Sector: Forums (I/O Tower)

i don't mean to drop in here and crap in your pool but i have a bit of advice for the project.

you have everything more than well laid out but there's one shortcoming that might give you a world of grief: your camera.

AVCHD is a notorious pain in the ass for cs3. you're going to have to transcode the footage into a codec that will be much easier to edit, chromakey, and color correct.

mainly avchd as a codec wasn't introduced until cs4 and even then it's a monumental pain to work in. (like getting 2 frames per second.) you'll basically tear your own hair out with how slow it is to work with. it's high quality but it bogs the cpu down trying to decode it in real time.

you're best bet is to convert the footage to something easier like h.264, quicktime files using animation preset at high quality or even uncompressed .avi which will soak up hard drive like nuts but a completely lossless conversion.

and sadly it's not even the only issue.

the camera just isn't made for this kind of work.

you need complete manual control out of it. no zooming, a real report of your focal length (50mm, 85mm, etc.) and a report of your sensor size to properly line up your rendered scenes with your footage.

i'd highly recommend Mark Christiansen's after effects cs3 compositing book, which at this point could probably be found dirt cheap used on amazon.

being a creepy infowhore i went and looked up the manual to the camera to give you the best settings to use while trying to capture footage for this film.

you want the recording quality at FXP giving you the highest detail, that'll record at a full 1920X1080, where the other modes record at 1440x1080 meaning you'd have to work your footage at a pixel aspect of 1.5 but your 3d work would be square.
(1.0) just use FXP and both will always match up without dealing with any headaches.

use 24P and 1/60 shutter speed for most scenes and a higher shutter for action scenes.
for the amount of keying work this is going to require it's best to get as much motion blur removed from your footage. (it's shutter-priority mode)

in fact i'd recommend 30P for any action scenes you wish to slow down a bit with speed ramping.

avoid cinema mode in the camera like the plague. it's unnaturally bumps up color saturation and contrast, which makes it very easy to blow out the brights and generally makes your footage extremely tough to color correct in post.

white balance manually each time you set up a new scene, changing the lights around on a new setup can change the color. just use a nice piece of office paper or cardstock to balance off of and it will save you a ton of trouble while editing.

so to condense my ramble down:

FXP quality, 24p, 1/60 shutter for most scenes, higher for action. AVOID cinema mode.
manual focus, manual exposure, manual white balance, turn off all image effects,

i know this seems like a rather chunky bombdrop in here but i come from the vfx world and i'd just like your project to be as pain free and enjoyable for you.