Adolfo Rozenfeld
Forum Replies Created
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Looks like a problem with the graphics card driver.
Try to update the driver to a newer version, and if it doesn’t help, try the opposite – switch to an older version of the driver.Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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[Martin Jordan] And usually, manuals aren’t very helpful with, in field tips on issues like this. At least that’s been our experience.
Historically, I would have agreed with you Martin.
But in recent years, the After Effects manual experimented a revolutionary change, to become a community-driven, user-focused resource. And it’s full of tips and tricks. Also, if you search Community help for a given topic, you’re not going to find just topics from the manual, but a lot of other web resources are indexed as well.[Martin Jordan] But AE really seems to suffer especially, when importing a 3D file from PS.
Martin, if you are familiar with 3D apps, you know that usually they work in a draft rendering mode (Gouraud shading, for example). And they work this way because rendering a 3D frame with higher quality can usually take from 30 seconds to 10 minutes for wildly sophisticated options like Global Illumination. And the PS renderer really supports these advanced rendering options.
So, when you take a PS 3D file to AE is no different, except that AE honors the render settings for the 3D layer in the PSD file. The workflow I would recommend is going to the 3D render settings in PS, choose a very fast/draft-like setting (and turn off expensive options like Refraction/Reflection), import the PSD with Live 3D in AE to set the overall animation, then “Edit original” to go back to PS, switch to a higher-quality rendering mode/options, save the file and see it update in AE.
You can do this as many times as you wish, and provided you invoke Photoshop with the “Edit original” command, you’ll always see the results immediately updated in AE. This, as a workaround for not having direct access to PS 3D render settings from within AE.
[Martin Jordan] I thought maybe it was some as you said, “simple user errors” that we might be doing and was looking for some advice on what we might be doing wrong.
I wouldn’t call this user error. It’s more about finding a workflow for a feature that it’s extremely intensive in processing load, as it is everywhere else (but with no direct controls to switch to draft render mode).
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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Bill, did you re-install AE after upgrading the OS?
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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Bill: Go to Preferences > Previews and press the OpenGL Info button. You’ll get a dialog with a list of OpenGL-accelerated capabilities. If all capabilities appear as “supported”, you probably don’t need to upgrade your graphics card for now. As you surely know, OpenGL acceleration in AE is more about speeding up interactions (dragging elements around in the Comp panel, adjusting parameters, etc), than it is about speeding up actual rendering (the OpenGL renderer won’t give the same results/quality as the software renderer).
A more powerful graphics card will take more operations to be defeated, sort of speak, and may also give better looking results. But it’s also fair stating that using effects or operations which are not OpenGL-accelerated will make OpenGL less relevant.Your recent OS/RAM upgrade, plus the quad core processor, will affect performance more clearly than a high-end graphics card.
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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What do you mean with “a source layer which is a comp of 300+ images”?
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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What’s the time length of the Comp?
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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If you upgrade the OS to Vista 64, AE will be able (and will need) to use all 8 GB of RAM, if you enable the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature, in Preferences > Memory and multiprocessing.
This feature spawns a separate rendering instance for each core in your computer, provided you have enough RAM to feed them (2 GB per core is the minimum recommended).
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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How long is your composition in time?
What kind of material/operations do you have in your Comp? As Todd asked, are you using Photoshop 3D? If you use the highest rendering options, you can get some serious rendering time.
Don’t worry about the 12 per cent used of 2.0 GB used in the splash screen. That’s a message before the application is operational.
XP 32 is severely challenged in memory handling, and yes, because of this AE can’t take advantage of the 4 GB in your machine. If you have a multi-core computer, you may want to consider upgrading to Vista 64 (or wait for Win 7). If you have a dual core machine, 4 GB will be fine. If you have a quad core processor, you want more than that to take advantage of multiprocessing.
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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Tim:
You don’t need a budget.
HDV is fine as an acquisition format. You can master to a digital file, and bypass tape for mastering. There’s no specific advantage for mastering to HDV, even if the content originated in HDV. Of course, unless you are required to do so. In that case, plase ignore this.In any case, you can’t add HDV compression to AE’s video preview. It will always be uncompressed, except when previewing DV25 or DV50 over Firewire devices. An editing application works differently in this regard.
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
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[quote] do any of the cards out there support HDV natively? Also, do you have recommendations for cards that play well with AE?
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AE supports HDV natively, but all internal processing and previewing is uncompressed. Note that even if you use HDV as source, there’s no compelling reason to master back to HDV tape or files. It will only introduce unwanted compression, and it’s not a standardized delivery format anyway.
So when previewing this way from AE, HDV sources will look perfectly, but non-HDV material (graphics, text, etc) will not be degraded my HDV’s MPEG-2 compression.Cards from AJA and Decklink both provide video output from AE. It’s up to you choosing which brand and model you prefer. I understand both will also let you preview HDV projects from PPro, but it would be a good idea checking with the vendors.
Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe