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After Effects 3-D "Maya ASCII" Procedure (Obsolete)
This is an older obsolete way of exporting to After Effects; it is generally more limited, for example, it does not export cards or moving objects. We include this procedure for reference only in case your facility is using it in its workflow.
1. In SynthEyes, export with “File/Export/Older/After Effects via .ma” to produce a (special) .ma file.
2. In After Effects, do a File/Import File
3. Change "Files of Type" to All File Formats
4. Select the .ma file
5. Double-click the Composition (Square-whatever composition in older AE versions).
6. Re-import the original footage
7. Click File/Interpret Footage/Main and be sure to check the exact frame rate and pixel aspect. Be especially careful with 23.976 and 29.97, entering 24 or 30 fps will cause subtle errors!
8. Rewind to the beginning of the shot
9. Drag the re-imported footage from the project window into the timeline as the first layer
10. Tracker nulls have a top-left corner at the active point, instead of being centered on the active point as in SynthEyes.
Important note : After Effects uses "pixels" as its unit within the 3-D environment, not inches or feet (ie it does not convert units at all). The default SynthEyes coordinate system setup keeps the world less than 100 units across. As AE interprets that as pixels, your 3-D scene can appear to be quite small in AE, as is the case in the tutorial on the web site, which is why we had to scale down the object we created and inserted in AE. It is much easier to adjust the coordinate system in SynthEyes first, so the 3-D world is bigger, for example by changing the coordinates of the second point used in coordinate system setup from 20,0,0 to be 1000,0,0, say. You can also use the rescaling parameter of the exporter. You can also use the rescaling parameter of the exporter to produce larger scenes, especially if you are exporting to several different packages.
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