Realtime preview for HD

[Jimmy Brunger]

If you set the RAM preview to loop then you’ll see it as Dave mentions…you may have it set to play+stop. As said before – Shift+RAM preview options are a good way to speed things up and get a rough idea of how large chunks of your comp are looking in motion.

Other than that – get a 64-bit OS and fill up with RAM. You should be able to access 4GB RAM in XP64 and anymore you get after that Nucleo will use to speed up the portion you can render.

Out of interest – what exactly IS the space bar for in AE? I never use it.

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Kevin Camp]

spacebar will render the preview to disk rather than ram. if you have a fast enough drive setup, i guess it’s just as good as a ram preview. although most of us prefer ram previews. the only advantage i can think of is if you like your preview, it saves you trouble of saving the render, it’s already saved, you just need to name it.

one other advantage might be that you probably have more disk space than ram, so you can preview a longer (or larger/higher frame rate) comp. but, again, i prefer ram previews over fragmented disk space.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Francois Driessen]

Ha! That’s quite a good question. Coming from FCP-land that was just the natural key to press to get things to play in AE.

Francois

>- e y e f l a m e .tv –< https://eyeflame.tv

[Jimmy Brunger]

You can do that by just hitting the ‘0’ key on numeric pad again though?

So, with spacebar saving previews to disk…where exactly is this getting saved and how do I rename it and save an AVI from it? It seems my spacebar render is pretty much as fast as RAM preview, as it’s using my RAID 0 I guess? Last question – does this disk render purge itself at any point, or does it just keep clocking up megabytes somewhere indefinitely?

Sorry for any stupid questions..I guess I never used spacebar since the old days when I had a 5,200rpm drive running EVERYTHING! It was so slow it’s not funny. I am intrigued by not having to re-render a RAM preview that I’m happy with..It’d be nice to not have to say to clients “OK, that’s what it will look like..now I just have to render it” and they say “but I’ve just seen it, why do you have to do it again!?”

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Kevin Camp]

i seem to be wrong about spacebar preview… you can’t seem save it any faster than a ram preivew. i’m pretty darn sure that when i first started using ae that was a feature…

this is going to bug me for a while, and i’m probably going to end up spending hours trying to dig up an old ae3.5 manual.

but you can save a ram preview (or spacebar preview) from the composition menu.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Francois Driessen]

Interesting.
What’s still strange to me is that even if it did render to the disc, (with Spacebar) my system plays back only about 15fps 720p24 in AE, but my raid delivers at least 245M/sec r-w ! (Enough for 1920p24 uncompressed!) So it must be doing something else other than just playing what was rendered once it runs over the rendered frames again.

[Kevin Camp]

spacebar preview is probably not writing to your raid, it is most likely using the system drive. that may be the performance hit… also, if you are using windows the file is probably written as an uncompressed avi, and i’ve seen several posts mentioning performance issues playing uncompressed avi’s in ae.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Scott Geersen]

on a similar note of getting realtime HD previews out of AFX, and something that i’ve been trying to make work for a long time, is realtime full-quality previews through my decklink HD extreme. AFX won’t do it, at SD or HD, whereas from FCP i can get realtime HD previews in full quality.
full quality is the key here: i can play back realtime when the video preview preferences are set to “faster” rather than “more accurate”, but faster has the effect of displaying on my broadcast monitor and client monitor as pixelated – if i change the output to “more accurate” i get pixel perfect full quality video out, but it won’t play back in realtime, even though the scene is cached in ram.

has anyone experienced this? even the guys at black magic are no help, they seem to think it should “just work” – and on an old G5 with AE6.5 it did. i’m not sure if it’s the intels that are somehow affecting it, or if it’s just AE7. it’s been very frustrating though having to daily explain to clients that it only looks pixelly because of AE’s output settings.