[Andrea Marini]

Walter, thanks for your extensive reply.

[Walter Soyka]
Give it a little more time. It took me a couple weeks before I really felt adjusted to a tablet as a mouse replacement.

After two more days, I feel a lot more comfortable. Tried the mouse yesterday, and instantly wanted to grab the pen again.

[Andrea Marini] “Is there a way to configure the ring in a more “reactive” way to scrub the timeline?”

I assigned the spacebar keystroke to the lower pen button so I can pan easily in each panel. I’m ok with dragging the timeline cursor as usual. I also assigned ram preview to one of the buttons on the tablet and some useful shortcuts to the radial menu, so I don’t have to reach the keyboard for every step (but this is very hard, I’m still comfortable with a hand on the pen and one on the keyboard).

[Walter Soyka]I use the deepest part of my desk (the corner in an L) and arrange it like this, back to front: monitor, keyboard, wrist rest, tablet, empty space.

Very similar to my actual setup. I made some adjustments pushing the monitor backwards, so I gained more desk space and now I can place my elbow on the side. The more I’m getting used to the tablet, the less movement I’m doing (or noticing).

[Walter Soyka]A final tip for a new Intuos user: explore and change the defaults!

I already tweaked the settings for After Effects and Cinema4d. I will give more time to the basic settings as I’m still keeping all the time a hand on the keyboard forgetting that I have 8 buttons and a ring. I’m taking notes as I work of which are my personal (most used) shorcuts, later I will assign them to express buttons.

Some issues I experienced yesterday:

1) Dual monitor (macbook 15 and external 24): I’m using the single monitor mapping as 90% of the time I work on the big screen. Yesterday I had problems when I tried the dual monitor mapping. I was watching a vimeo tutorial fullscreen on the macbook and following along on the 24″. The pointer started to behave strangely, I couldn’t go back to the monitor where the video was running fullscreen.

2) I’m confused when it comes the time to write with the keyboard. Sometimes I place the pen in the holder, sometimes I keep the pen and I write normally with the left hand and using just one finger in the right. If I need to write a long text like this one, I put the pen away.

3) Here in Italy it’s very hot now…sweat is a problem with the tablet!!

[Andrea Marini]

Thanks Ted, did more tests and got the same results, I think I’m complicating a thing that might be simpler 🙂

My main sequence it’s actually 8bpc with no color management at all (my machine becomes unresponsive at 32bpc, so I can’t work at that depth) . Now I’m wondering if it’s too late to change the color workflow of the AE project. Or perhaps, if it is correct to change to 32bit just before the final render, checking of course that all the colors and 32bit plugs are working correctly.

TEST1
I tried to reproduce our usual (and tested) workflow exporting a prores4444 to final cut and then did the tiff export from there and packed the dcp with DCPBuilder, I got the same color shift. Before doing the DCP all the colors (in the quicktime and the tiffs) are looking correct.
I even tried to set the “input source” to both BT.709 and sRGB and the results are the same (srgb even worse).

TEST2
I even tried outputting a digital cinema package with OpenDCP because I started thinking something could be wrong with our DCP app, but the problem comes out exacly the same.

To recap: I have now a 8bit (no color managed) project, the imported footage is prores422hq, and the movie is done mainly by freeze frames put in strips from the original footage and some simple motion graphic (vector logo, some glows and color correction).

What do you suggest starting from here to achieve doing a decent DCP matching (almost) with no hue and brightness shifts?

Note: we are checking the resulting DCP with easydcpplayer, from our previous experience its preview on our monitor it’s really close to the picture you’ll see in the theater (excluding luminance raise due to the projector light and the screen whiteness) (Of course we are not looking at the XYZ preview but at the XYZ -> linearRGB)

[Andrea Marini]

Thanks Ted,
my source material is 1080p, that is why I was thinking to work with a smaller format like 1998×1080 so I don’t have to scale up the footage, and it’s already 1.85:1 as the finishing facility asked. Do you think this workflow it’s correct, or you are suggesting that would be better to work in a bigger format?

[Andrea Marini]

John, that is exactly what I was looking to. Thanks for your help!

[Andrea Marini]

Thanks Ted, I was aware of that, it didn’t mean between layers (it’s on the bottom) but the position between objects (in scene). In the end, I did it parenting the xyz position of emitter to an existing object and now it is attached to the same position when camera is moving. For visibility, I set the objects in front as obscuration layers in particular.

Not sure this is the way to go, but it worked!

Thanks
Andy

[Andrea Marini]

Thanks for all your replies!

Will check the tutorial, seems that still image is the way to go!

[Andrea Marini]

EDIT: This is true for Lossless export. I tried to export ProRes4444 because I needed 16 bit, and in the rendered movie there are layers that should not be visible, or items from previous renders.

Now I managed the issue exporting all in lossless in some way, but I’m worried about this could happen again with medium projects like this one.

Could be all this a performance issue?

[Andrea Marini]

Figured out by myself…just wait!

I was mislead by looking at the application manager saying that AE was not responding. So I keep quitting and trying again.
But waiting a few moments without panicking, I discovered the spinning stood stuck for about 2 minutes, then the render started.

After that, I definitely need a mac pro 😉

bye
Andy

[Andrea Marini]

Errata corrige: the tiffs stopped at 65536. I found a similar post here on the cow but without a solution other than bringing the movie to a post house https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1114564

[Andrea Marini]

Thanks Kevin,
could I put this noise layer only on the precomp that is affected by lights? Because the surface has some text on it, and I’d like to keep it clear.