[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Hello, Paul.
It’s not related to being or not true 3D (to me, “true 3D” means that pixels are composited according to 3d coordinates, which is absoutely the case for AE). The exception is generated by a “3D aware” effect in a 2D layer (such as Particular). The output of these live on a separate 3D universe from AE’s own, and thus you can’t normally have intersection with AE 3D layers. This is why Particular offers the obscuration trick, which is really nice.

I don’t think you need masking. You’re really close. Make sure the Particular layer is above the obscuration layer. And then remember that particles will only be obscured if they are behind the obscuration layer in 3D space (normally along the Z axis, but it depends on the point of view). So, you should be able to have particles wrapping the obscuration layer, rather than just appearing behind.
Sometimes Particular needs you to reset the obscuration layer setting and set it again, because it creates actual layers to do the trick. It’s a bit tricky, but it should work.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

No problem, Dan.
AI changed its’ artboard/crop behavior recently, probably because of their new multiple artboards feature (remember there are people who use AI for print work? :)) So, apparently you ran into a glitch related to this. For now, you can use the workaround I explained in my e-mail, and we’ll see what’s going on. Thanks!

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

It simply does NOT work as advertised.

I’d say it works exactly> as advertised 🙂
There were lengthy posts about this recently. The fact that it’s not meant to be primarily used to speed up Render Queue renders doesn’t mean it’s trivial or useless. It does provide smoother/more responsive interactions for many features, which is its’ primary goal.

And yes, the Radeon 9800 is unfortunately not supported in CS3 and later, for the reasons I already explained in another forum.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Particular (and all other 3D camera aware plug-ins) can’t intersect in 3D space with AE’s own 3D layers.
However, Particular offers a very useful trick in this regard – it lets you set a specific AE 3D layer as an “obscuration layer”. This means that particles which are further away from the camera than that specific layer will be obscured by such layer. So, if you set a layer as the one you show in that picture as an obscuration layer, particles will be able to wrap around that layer.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

I would leave it at the default. It’s a good compromise.
After Effects CS4 is a 32 bit app that works better on 64-bit operating systems (because it can use a network of 32-bit background applications to render using multiple processors/cores and thus access more RAM than 32-bit applications can normally use).

The main advantage to a 64-bit application is breaking free from the 4GB limit for RAM usage for application (in some operating systems, like Windows Xp 32, the limit is much worse than this). So, if you had a ton of RAM, performance would improve when using very, very large source files and performing other memory intensive operations. Also, for example, RAM previews could take advantage of more RAM if you had it.

Note that currently AE CS4 can take advantage of ALL your 10 GBs (and it will happily take more) by using separate processes for rendering frames across multiple cores/processors.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

The golden rule is that you need at least 2GB per core. 3 GB per core for HD sized comps, large source files or 16/32 bpc processing.
So with 10 GB of RAM, you could use 4 cores by setting “CPUs to leave for other applications” to 4.
If you don’t do this, the rendering instances will starve from lack of RAM.

Leave everything else at default values, or you can keep “RAM to leave for other applications” at 1-2 GB, so you can keep doing simple tasks while AE renders.

If you want to use more/all cores for rendering in AE, getting more RAM is a good idea.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Thanks for sending the file, Dan.
I can see what you mean.
I’ll try to see why this happens.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

[Melvic Cano] ”
Melvic here and I am currently having issues with my adobe after effects CS4. When I render the final project to MPEG2, MPEG2-DVD, or even MPEG Blu-Ray, the sound or audio is being rendered as a separate file.”

That’s exactly the way it has to work.
DVD and Blu-Ray authoring applications are meant to take “elementary streams” (ie, separate video and audio files) and multiplex them (tie them together in a special container) for the authored result. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible for DVD/BD discs to have different audio languages, commentaries, etc.

You could set the encoder to multiplex the results (it’s one of the tabs at the top), but that kind of file would be of little use for an authoring application. Most won’t be able to use the audio unless you demux (ie, reverse of multiplex), because even though it’s in the same file, is not in a discrete audio track.

So, ultimately the question is: what do you need to do with these files?

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

If you want, e-mail the AI file to me and I’ll take a look.
arozenfe(sign)adobe.com

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Which version of AE are you using? If it’s CS4, make sure you update to 9.02 since there was an issue with AI file dimensions which was fixed in that update.

Other than that, AI has changed in the past few versions the way in which it reports the artwork area. So it’s important that the AI and AE versions match, or you may get these inconsistencies. Nothing that can’t be fixed, but it’s inconvenient.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe