Working with HD in AE

[Steve Roberts]

Search the AE help for “proxy”.

Steve

[Noe Marti]

What did you expect? HD 1080 has 5 times the pixels than SD so it demands 5 times the processing power.
Working with Proxis is the way to go…..or buy a PowerMac G5 Quad with 16 GB RAM.

[Jack Hilkewich]

I will try using proxy thanks for the tip. I am having to comp 4 different plates into one scene and they were shot outside over a period of a day, so the lighting has changed considerably over the 4 plates. How would one handle the color correction while using a proxy? Will it match when rezzing up?

Thanks

[Steve Roberts]

A proxy is just a low-res copy that is used temporarily, basically to speed up your workflow. When it’s time to render, you substitute the original clip. Actually, you can switch back and forth any time.

You can use the high-res original when color-correcting, then when that’s set, you can switch to the proxy when animating, to speed up workflow. The proxy may or may not look exactly the same, but you’ll be using the original when rendering.

It’s not uprezzing – your comp is still HD, you just choose to use an enlarged lo-res version in that comp temporarily. It can be switched on/off at will.

Does that make sense?

Steve

[Jack Hilkewich]

Yeah I read the help and I will use it more in the future. Sorry for Rezzing up but I couldn’t think of another way to say it,using a term from my editing hat. what is the difference from viewing it at 1/4 resolustion to using a proxy?

[Steve Roberts]

[Shayder] “what is the difference from viewing it at 1/4 resolustion to using a proxy?”

1. Your system is accessing a much smaller file from the hard drive.
2. AE is working with a smaller layer (effectively). Layer size is the speed killer.

Steve

[Jack Hilkewich]

Thanks for your help!

[Steve Roberts]

Good luck!

Steve

[Jayse]

Proxies are awesome and just not used enough by the general AE crowd. However they are extremely easy and a huge time saver.

If you need more help – I write about them and MANY other ways of speeding up your workflow and rendering in AE at http://www.xeler8r.com

https://xeler8r.com/downloads/class/NAB2005/Supersonic_Rendering_Speeds_05.pdf

Hope that helps!

// jayse

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[Jeff Petersen]

Jayse,
This is an article i have been looking for! i have been trying to set up an AE Render Farm on the Mac and have been having all kinds of trouble. i posted to this forum about it yesterday then it got swallowed by AE 7 stuff. i have only skimmed the pdf so far but it looks great! does it mention anything about Network settings/Sharing/appletalk? these seem to be gotchas in this? all my computers talk to each other, they just don’t work together!

I also tried QMaster software on the Mac. do you know anything about using that as a netrender?

You mentioned the Xserve cluster nodes may be better than a few minis-could you expand on the whole xserve cluster node a bit.

You seem to know way more about this than anyone else i found so far, so i hope you don’t mind these questions as i read your article.

Thanks Already,
Jeff Petersen