Good Preview; Bad Render

[Kevin Camp]

i’m not sure how you have ae7 with opengl enabled (any setting) working on a macpro. i had a similar setup a few years ago and had to disable opengl all together to keep from crashing.

but since it is working for you, a quick fix may be to force ae to use opengl for rendering (the option you have been setting is only for previews)…

to set ae to use opengl for rendering, in the render settings, click ‘best’. then from the settings window select ‘use opengl renderer’. then render and see if that works, my assumption is that if opengl gives you the look you’re after in preview then it should do the same for the final output…. however this is not the way i would normally recommend having things set up.

just a note on ae7 and intel-macs: ae7 was written with only powerpc code (the older g3, g4 and g5 series of cpus). to run on an intel mac, ae has to run under a powerpc emulator that apple created called rosetta. while rosetta works fairly well, it does restrict ae in the amount of ram it can use, and in my experience, broke opengl, caused a fair amount of stability issues and slow performance.

if you are able, i would recommend upgrading to cs3-cs4. those both contain native intel code and ae will run much better. also, with cs3-cs4 can use multiprocessing to improve performance, however you may want to get more ram, both can use up to 4gb of ram per core (4cores x 4gb = 16gb!!!), although i think you can get by with 4cores and 8gb of ram fairly well.

the down side of the upgrade to cs3-4 is that you may need to buy upgrades to your effects… the will need to be intel-mac (universal binary) versions as well. some are free updates, but others are paid upgrades…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jason Twite]

Hi Kevin,

I almost mentioned that in my first post; I’m aware of the Intel issue and originally believe that was the problem a couple weeks ago with another project and extreme system slowdown. I followed some steps/settings for the memory useage and it works! Well at least up until this issue.

I will try the fix you suggested later today and post the results.

As far as an upgrade from AE 7…. well…. talk to my boss lol. We require such little use from AE that he’ll never go for it. I’ve tried. Won’t even consider an upgrade to the latest FCStudio package. Everyone else in the office gets new MacPro Laptops and CS4 Web Premium, but not me. — End Rant.

thanks!

[Jason Twite]

AH HA! One silly little check box and things are looking much better. Looks like I have to work with the logo or find a different one as its very rigid around the edges after output, but at least its finally using the full quality.

Thanks Kevin!

[Kevin Camp]

one thing i’ve found with opengl is that it doesn’t handle pixel aspect ratio discrepancies very well, and that may be the problem with the logo file. make sure that the par of the logo file matches that of the comp.

if you needed to convert the file from one par to another in photoshop (say from 1.0 to 0.9). open the file in photoshop, then create a new file with similar specs, but in the advanced settings set the par to the same as the comp. then drag the logo layer into the new comp, photoshop will handle the par conversion. you may need to adjust the frame size of the new file to accommodate the logo after the par conversion using either the crop tool or image>canvas size.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW