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I’m sorry man but if he’s as confused by your post as I am I don’t blame him ignoping you, what exactly is the problem?
Glennser

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So reseating the card worked (kind of), got deck control back and insert edits work but assemble result in “General Error”.
No time to stripe tapes so moved raid to the 5.1.4 system and got one layoff frame accurate, the safety one frame off, this is killing us….
Glennser

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What kind of scripting are you doing? We’ve had some killer problems with large frames and running out of RAM, taken to rendering image sequences rather than our usual quicktimes and using the background render script as it seems to get further without crashing, still it does crash, sequences are great though as all I have to do is delete any corrupt frames and AE will automatically fill in the blanks, no wasted time setting the render area or patching movies together.
I’m trying NUKE right now, can’t say yet how the scripting is but the projects themselves are just scripts that seem easy enough to pick apart and edit (I’m not saying I can do that yet but looking at them in a text editor they seem pretty straightforward), there’s no way I’m switching to Motion but supposedly it’s projects are similarly editable, it would be cool if Adobe went that way too, the idea of being able to open a buggy project in a text editor and copy-pasting into a new file something I want to use seems really nice. Shake is officially dead and Combustion seems to be going nowhere fast so it’s AE, Nuke and Fusion that I’m keeping an eye on right now, Nuke and Fusion now run on Mac, PC and Linux too which is great too.
Don’t know if this has been any use to you, seems like a lot of people must be hitting the ram barrier too, interested in what scripting you’re doing too.

Glennser

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I don’t know much about the formats you mention but I do know that if you select the tracker keyframes and copy you can then paste that into an text editor or spreadsheet, you could probably then reformat that to match the other files you need.
Are you trying to do a 3d track or just get the data to another 2d application? There was a tutorial in the New Riders “After Effects 5.5 Magic” book that used Excel and After Effects to calculate a 3d track, I never really got how it worked but it might be of some use to you.
Best of luck,
Glennser

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Guess I made the mistake of thinking the centre of every comp would be an even y value (Doh!!), anyway sounds like you’ve got it down ok. What I will say is that even though the footage looks soft when you interpret it as fields it won’t look that bad if you field render, (again depending on where you place it in y it might soften up a bit if you end up rendering the interpolated fields, still it will look better than what you see in the comp window as that is basically half rez).
I usually do interpret it as fields though as it gives me the freedom to scale and place it wherever I want.
Glennser

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If the paint effects are the same each time the layer is duplicated you could precompose it, (make sure the paint effect goes into the precomp), and then replace all the duplicate layers with this composition (Option/Alt+Drag from project window onto the layers you want to replace, they should be selected first), then you can create a proxy for that comp and it won’t have to render each time, the cache might even be clever enough to speed things up without the proxy seeing as it’s being used multiple times but creating a proxy will ensure it works.
Glennser

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How does it look if you render progressive? If your motion isn’t too crazy that might work?

I’ve run into this before and got stung because pre-comps where a different height which messed up the fields when it came back in so I rendered the precomps progressive at double the framerate, big files but it took more or less the same time to render as a field render, apart from writing the extra frames of course.

The easiest fix is to render everything one way, either upper and lower and then reverse the field order by bringing the final render back in and nudging it a field (you’ll need to set the comp to 50fps to nudge it) in time.

You could also nudge it up or down a pixel to reverse the fields and just duplicate the bottom line that people won’t notice, in this case turn off the separate fields interpretation when you bring it back in and just do a progressive render as the fields are already in it.

If you render one field order, bring it back in and render the other field order it won’t look horrible but it will be a little soft as you end up with the interpolated fields instead of the sharp originals, by the time it gets to DV you probably wouldn’t see the difference.

Hope this helps, good call pre-rendering the nested comps, I’ve got into the habit of doing that recently, queuing all the nested comps first, post render action set to proxy and followed by the final comp, of course it fills up your drives and takes a bit longer but if you have to make a small change the next day it really pays off. I haven’t figured out a way to get his to work with a network render though as the post render actions don’t take effect using the watch folder, there must be a way using dummy files but it’s too much hassle.
Glennser

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If the footage is centred and not scaled the fields that come in will go back out the same way and look fine, if it’s nudged up or down less than a pixel you’ll get field mush, moved one pixel will effectively reverse the field order, you shouldn’t see the fields on a crt but it will look “shakey” and definitely wrong. Moving two pixels up or down and everything will be fine again, so y positions that are even are fine, odd reverse fields and decimals mush the fields. Scaling by 50% will look fine at draught but field mush at fine quality.
The best thing to do is interpret the footage with the correct field order as that will let you scale, rotate and position wherever you want and then field render if it’s ok to have fields in your output, if you frame render you won’t have fields but footage is effectively half resolution.
The y positioning thing can come in again if you really need good quality, if it’s not scaled and positioned on an odd y value you can end up rendering the interpolated second fields instead of the original field and will look a bit softer, you can fix it by nudging half a frame forward or backwards in time if you want to get tricky or just put it back on an even number, if you’re scaling or rotating it doesn’t matter.
Hopes this helps, fields can be a real head-wrecker if you think about it too hard, you have no idea how many hours of head scratching went into figuring out what I just told you, especially the interpolated field part, that one nearly had us pulling our hair out.
Glennser

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Wow, checking out the Adobe page it seems like no OpenGL at all on the Mac? That’s crazy, we’re mostly mac based here and it’s going to make a big difference to us, I’m already sick of hearing how “responsive” Motion3’s particles and 3d space is compared to AE, this is going to make AE seem like a dinosaur.
Maybe I need to take off the tinfoil hat but any chance Apple is purposely dragging their feet to give Motion3 an unfair advantage?
It seems a bit fishy that despite using the same hardware as a windows box there is no way for Adobe to tap into the OpenGL features of these cards when Motion can do it so well?
Don’t want to restart any slagging matches here but this does seem like a big deal, or am I overrating the advantages of OpenGL for day to day work?
Remember CS3 is a big launch for Adobe, the new 3d stuff in Photoshop can really use OpenGL too, (I don’t know what kind of system he had but the tutorial videos of the new 3d features in photoshop seemed to run ten times quicker on his PC than my mac with OpenGL disabled). I don’t know about Flash and Premiere but surely it would be better to have it working?
Anyone had a chance to demo CS3 on a nice PC with a decent graphics card yet?

Glennser

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We looking at it here too and came to pretty much exactly the same conclusions as you, achievable in AE using exactly the effects you mention but they probably used something with a bit more hardware acceleration, it’s hard to get the timing down for something like that without a really beefy system.
Glennser