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HD workaround?
My machine is very weak – 2,7 GHz Celeron that I have overclocked to 3,4 GHz, 1 Gigabyte of DDR-1 RAM and a lame FX 5200 graphics card.
I have heard that it is possible to edit HD on weak machines. Seems that there is some workaround.
My question is: Is there any way to work and edit HD video in AE on my weak machine?
It can’t even play real HD.
Barely plays 720P at 30 fps. -
3 Replies
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Hopefully it’s a short duration. Use AE’s proxy features to get going. This will allow you to work efficiently. But you’ll still need to render with the source (HD rex) footage when it comes time to render.
Lots of info on working with proxies. Please perform a COW search.
HTH
RoRKbroadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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[Blahtor Magnus] “I have heard that it is possible to edit HD on weak machines”
there’s a pretty big difference between editing and compositing… if you use an nle and you edit hdv footage, you can work on any system that is capable of playing dv in realtime (that’s just about any system that has a firewire port).
compositing and effecting hd in after effects will be much more demanding on your system. when editing on an nle, the primary thing that matters is realtime playback of the footage. hdv footage actually has a lower data rate than dv25 (the typical sd dv variety). so hdv is rarely a problem for an nle.
in after effects, each frame gets rendered. the more pixels in the frame, the longer it takes to render… the more frames per second (like hd 720 @ 60 fps), the longer it takes to render….
so, yes it’s possible to edit hd on weak machines, but they probably aren’t editing in after effects. it will be harder to work with hd footage and comps in after effects than it would be to edit hd in an nle, so, as roland points out, you will want to use a workflow that incorporates low-res proxies to work with, then render using the hd.
[Blahtor Magnus] “Barely plays 720P at 30 fps”
you should actually get realtime playback of ram previews if you are hitting the zero on the numbers pad to ram preview (space bar render the preview to disk, and you may not get realtime playback). note that the number of frames that you can render is limited to the number of frames that will fit into your ram… with only 1gb that may not be too much. setting the comp viewer quality to a lesser setting (like half or quarter) will allow more frames to fit into ram and setting the viewer scale to smaller values (like 50% or 25%) will render previews more quickly.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Hi guys, thanks.
I am having problems previewing the videos in Sony Vegas too (I believe it is a NLE).
Anyways, this proxy business sounds cool.I have watched Andrew Kramer’s video about proxies and he said that the only problem would be when using the motion tracking function.
I think that there will be a problem if you want to key out a green screen using a proxy too becaus eof the lower resolution of the proxy and the loss of detail.
Can somebody shed some light on this?
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