Monster AE comps

[Steve Roberts]

Work with proxies (check the Help) until you render.

Use the Secret prefs when rendering so you don’t run out of RAM. Hold down the shift key when accessing the prefs>general, and don’t release the shift key until you get the main prefs dialog. Look in the drop-down for “secret”. Try purging 5-15 frames there.

[Charlie Hughes]

Hmm.

Shift doesn’t appear to be doing anything. Is this a pc and mac function? No drop down seems to be manifesting in the general.

I’m going to try to figure out what ‘proxies’ are all about now.

Thanks for your help 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

Yep, it works on both. Hold shift down longer than you think you should when you select prefs>general. “Secret” should appear at the bottom of the list in the dialog box, not the menu at the top of the interface.

[Charlie Hughes]

I went into the After Effects menu at the top of the interface. Holding shift, i clicked the after effects window, scrolled to preferences, and then clicked general.

The general preferences is just a bunch of check boxes, including:

Show Tool Tips
Tabbed Windows
Close Multiple Views Simultaneously.

I doubt the secret menu would appear here, under the “Use System Shortcut Keys”.

So perhaps I’m accessing the general prefs incorrectly. Do i NOT click General, but rather just get to the window in which general is an option and there beneath general would be a secret preferences option?

Like, as in, go After Effects > Preferences > DO NOT CLICK ANYTHING. and wait for Secret to be among the preferences options within the After Effects menu?

If you’re being clear and i’m not following, i apologize.

[Steve Roberts]

Well, right off the top, you have to choose something. Hold down shift before you click edit>prefs>general, and only release it when you see the big dialog box that has “show tool tips” and such. Click on the word “general” to access the “hmm, maybe I really don’t want general, I want something else” drop-down menu. 🙂 That is where you should find “secret” at the bottom.

[Charlie Hughes]

Ah, there it is…

Thank you for your patience!

[Steve Skazenski]

FYI, AE 6.5 runs in emulation (Rosetta) on Intel Macs like the Mac Pro. This will slow you down significantly.

[Charlie Hughes]

Really.
Shit.
What about After Effects 7.0?

[Steve Skazenski]

Nope… AE CS3 (8) is the first Universal version. Running it through Rosetta shouldn’t be unbearably slow with a really fast machine like you must have. Though obviously running AE natively would be screaming fast…

Even while under Rosetta, I think it will still try to use your extra processor cores, but I’m not positive. You can check by running Activity Monitor and seeing if AE’s usage goes above 100% (with a 4-core Mac Pro, 400% is the max, and presumably 800% on an 8-core Mac).

[Brendan Coots]

What pixel dimension is your Photoshop file? Are you using more than one?

One option is to slice your Photoshop file up into several chunks, i.e. 4-8 separate files depending on the size. You can reassemble them into one comp in AE, and do your camera moves on the comp. After Effects is much better at processing several smaller files than one large one, because of the way the buffer works. I bet doing this alone will dramatically improve your performance.