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too big for Motion?
I imported a Photoshop file with a size of 2.4 MB and consisting of 11 layers. It began as a .png still (24K) exported from a FCP HDV project. Within Photoshop, I broke the still into shards of glass on separate layers with the intention of animating the breakup in Motion 2 in an HDV 1080 60i project.
To the motion, I added a smoke emitter behind the “break”, which appears afterward. The project is 6 seconds long.
I’m pleased with the results in 8 bit, but was looking for a little more realism in the smoke, so I tried changing to 16 bit float and exporting that movie (animation codec, lossless+alpha).
The resulting movie is smooth in a few spots, but for the most part is a little screwy and has random bright blue patches that appear and make it unusable.
I’m using a G5 dual 2.5 with 3GB of RAM. Any suggestions for getting a clean 16 bit render?
Many thanks,
Mike -
7 Replies
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Hey Brian,
The color patches you describe sound like OpenGL freak-out. What graphics card do you have in your system? Also, what operations were you doing that required 16-bit?
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LOL, don’t know why I said “Hey, Brian”…. sorry about that, Mike. 🙂
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I have the stock radeon 9600xt… could that be making the difference? It’s my understanding that emitters rely heavily on the processor. I don’t know much about Open GL though, so I’m not sure what else to try!
It renders fine in 8 bit though. However, there’s a noticeable difference the smoothness and realism of the smoke in 16 bit and that’s why I was hoping to use that version. On the HDV output it makes a difference. Again, it’s probably a case of my wanting to tweak with something that looks okay.
Thanks for your response!
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Hey Mike,
They may be artifacts from running into the memory limits of your card. There are a few factors involved: the memory dedicated to the display, the size of the images being processed and the bit-depth of the project. If you have two displays, for example, the system divides the card memory between them, so in your case it would be 64MB for each (assuming your card has 128MB). It sounds like your project is HD-rez (if you’re doing HDV), so those are bigger images. Then, when you go into 16-bit, each image now takes up twice as much memory on the GPU as 8-bit. Between any and all of that, you may be toeing the line as to what the card can handle, so it could be producing funky, corrupted images. Or maybe it’s an ATI driver bug…who knows?
I usually refrain from the constant cry of “Buy a new card!”, but you may find your problems gone if you were to get a 256MB GPU. Also, the Nvidia cards, like the 6800GT, have accelerated 16-bit rendering that is MUCH faster than the ATI 16-bit. You may also want to see if optimizing your project helps at all. Are the smoke particles running way off-screen and living for a long time? Remember: Motion renders everything, not just what is inside the project size. If you can adjust the life of the particles, they die right after moving off-screen, which results in a smaller render image, which means you might squeeze by without artifacts. Give it a shot.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
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You can make the project 16- or 32-bit float but work with the view turned down to 8-bit by deactivating float space display in the view button in the Canvas.
Jim Kanter,
Digital Film Institute
http://www.dfilminst.com -
Thanks Jim. I “unchecked” the float space and it runs faster.
For some reason the render is still having trouble… lots of bright purple appear every few frames when the 16 bit smoke renders, even when I deactivate all the other layers. I’ll keep working on it.Thanks for all the great FCP/Motion users group meetings in Atlanta. I’m in Charleston, SC now but I always learned so much. Hope things at the new facility are going well!
Mike Eberly
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Try unchecking use dithering in the render options tab, it helps with 16 bit float sometimes
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