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Footage issues in renders
Greetings,
I am experiencing some trouble while I am in After Effects and with-in my rendered movies. This problem is related to another thread in this very forum, and I will provide the link below:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/927748#927842
To my knowledge no one has answered this query successfully as of yet, and I really need a solution to this problem.
Here is a quick over view of what is happening. I import my footage using the Automatic Duck XML importer from Final Cut pro. The footage comes in and sometimes the gamma is way off (footage is overly white). The footage will flash overly white sometimes during ram preview renders at times and sometimes it will not. It happens with footage movies whether there is an effect on it or not.
Mostly I use Keylight to composite green screen footage, and the phenom shows up often.
When I render there is flashing color bars or the gamma is out of whack.
I am on a apple Intel 8core system with 10GB RAM, running CS3 (which I am afraid to upgrade). Additionally, I pull my projects a footage from a internal LAN through gigabit copper, that is dedicated to my video work flow.
I would appreciate any help and/or insight.
Thank you in advance.
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2 Replies
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For the washed-out issue, it MAY help to enable “Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustment” in your project settings, and make sure to do a “purge all” on your ram cache before doing RAM previews. This is to ensure old frames are getting flushed out of RAM and properly replaced with newly rendered frames.
Newer versions of After Effects read gamma metadata from certain codecs and adjusts accordingly. This is great with some source material but it can cause major confusion with others. The “Match Legacy” option basically forces After Effects to ignore this metadata.
The flashing color bars is a little tougher. If I had to guess, it sounds like you might be getting spotty bandwidth on your single-gigabit line. Gigabit can, on average, deliver about 40-60MBps if configured correctly, BUT that says nothing about the consistency of the connection overall. If you download Aja’s free disc speed test and run it, you will see that your connection dips and spikes wildly over a gigabit connection, sometimes jumping between 5MBps and 70MBps from sample to sample. This is the nature of ethernet/TCPIP. It could be that your connection is fluctuating so wildly (from heavy internet or other traffic during renders) that AE literally fails to connect with the source footage here and there, and renders the color bars as a result. I could be wrong here, but it’s the only answer that makes any kind of sense to me.
If this is in fact the problem, a fix will cost a little money – add a second gigabit line to both your mac pro and the machine serving up your footage, and get a router/switch that does link aggregation (802.3ad) so that the two gigabit lines act as one, giving you much more bandwidth/overhead to work with (closer to 90MBps average). The HP Procurve 1800 24G does the job and is a relative bargain at $380.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Yes! I was thinking that exact same thing last night it occurred to me on my commute home. I have the setup ready for a link aggregate(two nic cards working in unison), but I have not implemented it as of yet. I actually started to, but I had some technical issue, any way.
The low bandwidth is a good possible cause for all the malfunctions. I wonder if you or any one knows any good sources on bandwidth requirements verses multiprocessing and multi-machine rendering?
I have a SATA stack that is raid at 10 for project files and a stack at raid 0 for captured elements. Where is the bandwidth wall and how can I be sure I am hitting it?
Thank you
Roy
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