• Adobe After Effects

  Big stuff and the need for speed

  Posted by Kenny Mims on February 28, 2009 at 1:19 am

  I reckon this is a workflow issue…

  I am trying to do an animation of the state of Tennessee… where the map
  zooms up from 0% to about city resolution (which is about 2% of the map).

  It has little flickering stars on a bunch of the cities.

  So… my approach was to generate my base map in Photoshop (c. 7000 pixels wide),
  then import into AE (original size comp… giant)

  THEN add the little flickering stars as required, and then animate the zoom in.

  THEN… reduce my composition size to 25% (allowing me some amount of positioning
  room with my final image [to accommodate screen text etc.]).

  THEN… render the parts (map + county overlay + flickering stars + etc.)

  Then import into master comp (SD 720×480).

  This is slow as the Dickens, but it works.

  Perhaps another brilliant mind could suggest another approach.
  Like maybe using a vector image as opposed to bitmap?

  LOL… how hard we work for 5 sec. onscreen time.

  Kenny Mims

  Brendan Coots replied 17 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  February 28, 2009 at 1:40 am

  you might check this tutorial out:
  https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/

  it shows a good technique to zoom from neighborhood level to earth level (view from space)… basically you’ll use a few different map layers of varying resolution, but control them with one animated layer.

  you could also do what you mentioned and make a vector map… you could create the vector as shape layers in photoshop or in ae (if you use photohsop, when you import you’ll need to import as comp, maintaining editability). of course any raster detail (like topography) would still be a problem.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Brendan Coots

  February 28, 2009 at 7:57 pm

  AE tends to choke on larger images and slow things waaaay down. A 7000px wide bitmap image can consume hundreds of megs of RAM (or more) per frame, whereas using vectors you could pull in a tiny, 100Kb file and scale infinitely. It goes without saying that vectors are going to save you a lot of processing and rendering. If you must use bitmap graphics, however, here’s one technique to speed things up and prevent render errors.

  Create a comp the size needed (in this case, sounds like 7000px wide X whatever height), but in Photoshop break up your master map into 1000×1000 or smaller squares. Pull all of these squares into AE and reassemble within your giant comp.

  Visually the result is exactly the same, but After Effects is being tasked with processing a handful of average sized images rather than one huge, RAM hogging file. Depending on the source materials, the difference in processing and rendering speed can be quite substantial.

  Brendan Coots
  Splitvision Digital
  http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

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