hey guys

I'm trying to outout my after effects work to my camera thru firewire.

Now under Edit > Preferences > Video Preview i only have 1 option and it's "Desktop Only" and I believe I should have FireWire as an option too.

any help would be awesome.

thanx

AE doesn't know about camera's and firewire cards. It doesn't
care. It is simply a program that you load media into, manipulate
it and then output media again. How you get that media to where
you want it to go it basically "your problem".

So after you are done with your composition in AE simply output
back to AVI DV at full quality and load that up in your NLE (Premiere
for example). Then use the print to tape feature to dump it back
to tape.

There was a plugin available for AE that outputs AE's monitor
over firewire so you can use a camera, DV deck or DV bridge
to view the signal you are working with on a TV/monitor.

AE is not realtime so an output capability doesn't do you any good if you are trying to record to tape.

I have the Canopus output driver for AE. It really helps compared to the computer monitor display.

FWIW
Canopus also makes an output driver for Photoshop that allows one to see the image on a NTSC monitor. That too is very useful.

i have been outputting my stuff into an NLE program and then getting it on tape but I have it right here in my Creating Motion Graphics book

"A recent addition to after effects is a feature that lets you have the comp echoedout through Firewaire to a DV device"

and they say it is done by doing the steps i listed above.
I was just wondering if this has worked for anyone else.

I have never heard or seen this, Jim. Not to say it isn't there.
But seeing the lack of responses to this thread, I'm thinking no-
one else has either.

Have you tried to do a newsgroup search over at Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/)?

I believe that there is an output plugin for AE that comes packaged with the Parhelion Card by Matrox....3 head card and plugin, run about $379...I have seen the Storm plugin in action and if you have the ram and horsepower, it works really well.

When they say echoed out I believe they are referring to Echo Fire (http://www.synthetic-ap.com), and AE plugin. SyntheticAperture is the mfg. and they make other interesting software for video.