Issues when rendering in terminal…

[Walter Soyka]

[Simon Ball] “When rendering through the terminal, keyed footage that appears clean in AE has holes in its alpha channel. I’m using the keylight plugin and when viewing full quality in AE, as well as when rendering out of AE to QT, the alpha channel is clean, with no spots.”

That’s really odd; I was under the impression that AE actually uses aerender when rendering multiple frames, and I’ve never noticed anything like that when rendering from Terminal.

You’re on Snow Leopard; have you installed the AE 9.0.2 update?

Can you post the command you’re using to invoke the renderer?

[Simon Ball] “In addition to this, I’ve found that colours change slightly when rendering through the terminal compared to the AE composition window. “

Are you by chance comparing the results in a Quicktime player with the results in AE? Gamma issues still abound; do the results look the same if you reimport the footage into AE?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Simon Ball]

Thanks for the response Walter. I’m actually comparing the two movie files in quicktime. This is where the differences are showing. And yes, I’m using snow leopard and AE 9.0.2.

The command I’m using to invoke the render is…

‘/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/aerender’ -project /Volumes/folders/folder/project.aep

I was also under the impression that aerender read directly from the aftereffects file and render queue keeping all settings as normal.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated…

[Walter Soyka]

[Simon Ball] “The command I’m using to invoke the render is…

‘/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/aerender’ -project /Volumes/folders/folder/project.aep”

Simon, I have no idea why that would render differently inside of and outside of AE. It should be the same. Is OpenGL turned off?

When rendering from the command line, I always specify all my settings; what comp to render, what render settings to use, what output module to use, etc., but if everything is set up properly in the queue, I don’t see why it should make a difference. Sorry I can’t be more helpful here.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events