Animating effects on/off

[Nico Jones]

All the incredible things we can do in AE…and we can’t animate effects on and off. I wanted to do this a while back. No dice 🙁

[Peter Whittaker]

Fair enough :-/ I looked into a bit more and found the read-only “active” property for effects, but that’s no use.

In the end I’ve animated the radius and intensities down to zero, since it twice as fast as leaving them up. Duplicating layers isn’t worth the hassle…after all, I can let the machine work overnight on the sequences.

Thanks for the support though!

[Peter Whittaker]

I don’t feel comfortable unless I know the machine is slaving away while I’m at home 🙂

In this case though cutting the effects down means I can get two 20-minute sequences rendered in one night rather than just one. Given how close I’m working to a deadline, that might be a lifesaver! Now if only AE’s H264 encoder was as good as plain old Quicktime Player…

[Danny Princz]

if you are using QT pro to make h264’s, then check out MPEG streamclip. its free, cross platform, and has better and faster results the QT pro

who is that masked man…

[Peter Whittaker]

hmm, nice tip…trying it now. I’ve been also trying Episode Pro, I’ll report back with results!

Thanks,
Peter

[Steve Roberts]

[Dave LaRonde] “If you render an image sequence, you simply re-render the affected frames and not the whole movie.”

You could set up the render queue to render some frames with effects “on” in the render settings, then render other frames with effects “off” in the render settings. Punch “render” and the queue renders ’em. It might work.

[Peter Whittaker]

Dave, I’m using image sequences for a lot of the precomps, but I’ve been sticking with QT Animation files for final output. The final QT is 73 gigs: I haven’t tried a PNG sequence but IIRC it’ll be a lot larger. Second catch: I have a lot of my stuff prerendered, and in that case the render itself is a lot faster if you output to a single file format rather than a sequence (i.e. its mostly I/O rather than effects processing).

3rd catch: using QT Pro to stick image sequences seems to take FOREVER! Now I use AE to stitch em, at least it gives me a proper progress bar.

In short, I’m using a mix of the two approaches. I definitely see the benefit of rerendering only a small sequence of images rather than the whole lot, and its saved me a few times already on this project. Maybe I’ll just go the whole hog and see how big the final PNG sequence would be. Need to get a bigger HD though! 🙂

[Peter Whittaker]

Good idea!

..but I’d need to set up 24×4=96 different render jobs.

The alternative is to just hit Render once, and go home for the night.

Which would you pick? 😉

[Peter Whittaker]

Well the effects start on each layer, fade out, then come back in at the end. So I’d need to do two splits for each layer. It’s my own damn fault for being too tricksy!

>Motion blur’s another big-time render hog.

Hmm, I’d assumed if the layer wasn’t moving it wouldn’t process it.

*runs off to find out*

[Peter Whittaker]

well whaddya know, AE is stupider than I thought. Turning off mblur for the static layer saves me another 8-10 secs on a 60-sec short render.

So maybe it is worth splitting everything. That said, I could stop benchmarking and I’d have it all rendered by now!