Importing Footage

Once your footage is imported into After Effects, you will probably need to change some of its settings in the Interpret Footage Window. Unlike earlier versions of the Magic Bullet filter, Frames Plus will automatically set the Separate Fields to None.

In this window you have an opportunity to see the frame rate of your footage and change it if you wish. The three frame rates that Frames Plus supports are 29.97fps, 23.976fps, and 25fps. If your footage is NTSC, it must be left at 29.97fps. If your footage is PAL, you should either leave it at 25fps for clean 25p PAL output, or reinterpret it to 23.976 for clean 24p NTSC output (with 3:2 pulldown).

Normal PAL
PAL footage for an all-PAL project

Sow PAL
PAL Footage for film output or an NTSC conversion from 24p

When you re-interpret QuickTime footage frame rates, setting PAL 25 frames per second to 23.976, After Effects gives you a warning about audio sync. To correct this do the following:

After Effects itself will do a remarkably good job of this stretch if you follow these instructions: Import your audio separately from your video. Place it in your 23.976fps comp. With your footage selected, reveal the tab for Stretch (or select Time Stretch… from the Layer Menu) and enter 104.2709%. Now from the Layer Menu select Enable Time Remapping. This last step is very important as it triggers After Effects to use a very high quality audio re-sampling technique.

Lastly, make sure that After Effects has properly guessed your Pixel Aspect Ratio. If your footage is 16:9, you may have to manually adjust the settings in the Pixel Aspect Ratio pop-up.

Make sure your Pixel Aspect Ratio is correct for your footage. If your footage is NTSC, make sure it is at 29.97fps. If your footage is PAL, you can either leave it at 25fps for clean PAL output or re-interpret it to 23.976fps for clean NTSC output.

Placing Your Footage in a Composition

The next step is to place your footage into a comp of the same pixel size and aspect ratio. A great way to do this is to drag your footage to the Create Comp button in the Project Window. That’s the icon right between the folder and the trash can.

Create a Comp
Dragging footage to the Create Composition button

Once you’ve done this you again have some options. If your footage is NTSC you can either convert it to 30p or 24p. Using 30p is a nice way to make NTSC footage look less like video without incurring any motion artifacts, but it is a frame rate that is very incompatible with film output. Only opt for 30p if your project is never destined for film output!

If you desire 30p output, you can proceed to the next step, since your comp is already at the correct 29.97fps. If you desire 24p output, open the Composition Settings Window and carefully type 23.976 into the Frame Rate field. If your footage is PAL, you have already decided whether you want 25p or 24p output and made the correct settings in the Interpret Footage Window. Your comp should already be at the correct settings.

Drag your footage to the Create Comp button in the Project Window. If your footage is NTSC and you desire 24p output, change the newly created comp’s frame rate to 23.976.

Applying The Frames Plus Effect

You are now ready to apply the Frames Plus plug-in. Select your footage and find Magic Bullet > Frames Plus in the Effect Menu. All this setup is about to pay off, because Magic Bullet is designed to configure itself automatically based on the specifications you’ve entered thus far. The first thing you’ll notice after applying the effect is that your image disappears and the Auto Setup button is the only thing visible in the Effect Controls Window.

Button
Click the Auto-setup button.

If you’ve done everything correctly, Frames Plus should display a comforting dialog corroborating your expectations of what the Bullet’s about to do.

If something has gone wrong, the dialog along with the Messages field in the Effect Controls Window should help you figure out what you need to fix like whether the field order is incorrect or perhaps that no fields could be detected. Try setting the Source Video format manually in this case.

Even if Auto Setup fails, you can still proceed with using the Frames Plus conversion. Auto Setup only changes settings for Source Video and Field Order, and you can easily set these yourself if you are familiar with your footage. Additionally, in some cases, a successful Auto Setup may not yield correct results. This could happen if your video card uses an uncommon field order or pixel size. For example, footage captured with an Aurora Igniter card will be Upper Field First, not lower, requiring you to make this adjustment manually. Please always double-check that Auto Setup has done the right thing for your particular footage.

Assuming everything’s going smoothly, click OK and observe as the Auto Setup button stows itself and the controls for Deinterlacing appear.

If you get a message that Auto Setup has succeeded, proceed to the next step. If Auto Setup fails, double-check that you’ve followed the above instructions correctly and try again, using the Messages field in the Effect Controls Window to help your troubleshooting.

The parameters that have been set automatically all live under the Deinterlace category. The first one, the Do Deinterlace checkbox, is by default always set to On. You can turn it Off if you are using Frames Plus only for its Deartifacting features or use the separate Deartifacting filter. Otherwise leave it on.

Once it is clicked for the first time, the Auto Setup button stows itself and turns gray, indicating that it has done its job. However, if at any time you wish to reconfirm that the plug-in is configured properly (especially after making changes to the Comp Settings), you may twirl down the Auto Setup control group and re-click the button.