Andrew Shanks
Forum Replies Created
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ah, that old chestnut, …I share your pain, …its even worse when doing 2K film comps in floating point. It’s to do with how After Effects buffers whole layers into memory rather than using a scanline renderer like other packages (such as Shake).
There is a solution I came across just the other day (haven’t actually had time to give it a go, but looks pretty reasonable). Here’s the link (it describes what is happening and ways to try and get things to work).
https://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.aspGoodluck!!
andrew
🙂
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I’m from NZ and have done work abroad (although not the US). First thing you should do is contact a few of the larger FX companies that run After Effects. The Orphanage and ILM’s Mac Rebel dept are two that spring to mind. You need to get one of them interested in taking you on (so make sure that showreel is sharp and shiny, …keep it less than 90seconds too as any longer and most recruiters will switch off, …not good if your best stuff is at the end). If they are interested in you, they will sponsor you and start work visa proceedings (this can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months depending on the country). They will typically get you over for maybe a 2 to 3 month contract (means they can see if you’re going to work out without commiting too much up front), …and if you work out it can usually be extended.
Thats about it really, just find a sponsor, a company that can see your potential, thats the big thing (just remember the competition in the US is pretty massive as they have a lot of media schools churning out new artists every year, …and often facilities will much rather get in a cheaper graduate to train up than get experienced artists from overseas). The good thing is, once you’ve done one tour of duty and proved yourself, you’ll never be short on job offers from that country.
May I also suggest learning either Fusion or Shake (just to get nodal compositing under your belt, it doesn’t take much to get your head around it), I work in both AE and Shake, …it makes you far more marketable.Goodluck!
andrew
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Forgot to add, all these layers are present in one hit, ….it is a massive comp, basically like building a crowd and environment from hundreds of individual elements.
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Thanks for the advice, ….I am used to using proxies (Shake is my other main application, and with film work you spend a lot of time using them in order to speed things up), …basically I’ve been given image sequences in order to build a rough offline but these image sequences have no keycode or timecode links to the source footage (at my end that is, they all kick off at 0000 frames), …my current cut list will now go back to the client, and they will match my frame numbers with some sort of key that ties those shots back to the original key-codes/timecodes/reels, …then DPX scans will be requested, and I will get those. I will also be doing the online in Shake, so really Proxies don’t work for what I am doing at this point.
As it is, its been quite quick doin this by hand, I’ve made a table of all source clips used (after reducing the project), and am now going through each pre-comp and main comp, registering the in and out points for each source clip (just double click each layer in turn and check the in/outs).
I think it will be an interesting exercise at some point to do a script, so yeah, will put that on the backburner until I have some time to dabble i think. 🙂
Cheers,
andrew
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I have just had a very quick skim though the AE scripting PDF manual, and there is an example in there (file fun) that prompts you to load a project, then will write a txt file out that lists all the compositions in the project. This looks like i solid base for what I want to do. Anyone have any quick tips as to how to modify this to list layer source name and source in/out points?
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Hi,
I think you mean “Pixeldust”, it was a product in development by 2d3 (the guys who make Boujou), it has been shelved indefinitely. Here is a link to the status:and here is what that statement says in case the link doesn’t work:
“Unfortunately Pixeldust is not under active development at this time. Although the underlying technology is excellent, it has proved very difficult to see how this technology can be incorporated into common compositing packages such as After Effects, Shake, etc. This difficulty is due to the fact that Pixeldust needs to have random access to all frames in a sequence. All compositing packages that we have looked at do not support this functionality in any efficient way.
We will continue to review the position and may restart the project if a solution becomes apparent.”
May I suggest you look at Mokey, it does the same thing as a stand alone application:
Goodluck,
andrew
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AE6.5 will remain on your system and fully working (which can be handy sometimes if you need to use an old plug-in that won’t work in AE7). The plugins you have in AE6.5 won’t automatically be part of AE7 (since it creates a new folder for AE7), …but depending on the plugin, you should be able to copy and paste them from the AE6.5 plugin folder to the AE7 folder (I just tested this with Silhouette Roto, and it worked). Maybe just do a google search for AE7 compatible plugins first though (and download any updates for those that need them).
Cheers,
andrew
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yeah, totally, good plan (its actually a technique I was shown in Shake that I adapted for AE). Give it a whirl and see how it works for you. Tracking basic roto shapes then tweaking the shape where needed ends up giving a lot smoother roto than lots of manual tweaking I find. If you do a lot of roto I recommend Silhouette, it does a sweet job (allowing you to track whole shapes or points on a rotospline, plus it has transforms on mask shapes that interpolate correctly over time, …i.e. no silly work arounds like the one I described).
Goodluck!andrew
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The upgrade is totally worth it, …the interface change alone is worth the price of admission, ..granted the first couple of days you’ll be pulling out your hair wondering where all those filters are now stashed (they’ve rejigged a few of the filter headings) and just getting used to how things work, but once you get used to the new UI, its just so productive, that its very very hard to go back to v6.x.
…I wouldn’t wait for 7.5, …as has been mentioned already, Adobe tends to do releases about every 18 months on AE, so we might see 7.5 towards the end of next year, …but who knows. My advice is if you can afford the upgrade to 7, get the upgrade, you’ll be glad you did.
cheers,
andrew
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Probably best to ask exactly what sort of roto you are doing. Mokey is a specialized application for automating a bit of the pain that would normally be associated with rotoscoping (in regards to extracting a moving object from a background that isn’t a greenscreen/bluescreen backdrop, or creating a clean background plate (i.e. getting rid of foreground objects and filling in the gap thats left)). It doesn’t work for everything, and it is extremely expensive, but if interested I think they have a demo version you can try.
Really Silhouette roto is the best around (at the moment), …Weta use it in their roto dept (albeit the stand alone version). Roto is what you end up doing when all else fails (in regards to extracting an object/person from one shot and putting them in another), thats why i said, don’t expect any magic automated applications that will do this for you (Mokey is the closest to that type of application you can get at this stage, …Pixel Dust will be another contender soon, and I’m sure as optical flow technology develops further, we will get more software that works these bits of magic for us, …but at this stage, its usually a lot of long hours tweaking rotosplines). Often you will use luma keys, combined with colour keys, and/or channels manipulated to give mattes for the edges of an object, then use rough roto to fill in the holes.
If you follow the tips/tricks on Scott’s site (listed in my previous posting), and take advantage of Silhouette’s ability to apply motion tracking data to shapes and points on a roto-spline, …you’ll do fine.
Best tip I have is to get some good music, put on some headphones, and just go for it (roto becomes automatic after practice, …when it does so you can really just zone out and find its almost theraputic), ….music really does help keep you going.
🙂