[Andy George]

Bill,
What’s your system specs?
Im guessing you would need at least 3-4 fast drives in a performance raid
to be able to play this back without dropping frames.

There is very little if any benefit to using the “none” compression option. Pick a lossless
codec like animation or Prores. The quality will be the same, the file size will be much smaller.

Not to say that you will be able to play the quicktime back on your system without dropping
frames if you render to a lossless codec. Your system may not be up to the task if your operating
off of a single drive.

H.264 is an interframe codec and not sutable for editing or working with in AE.

Dave LaRonde explains:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

Dave’s Stock Answer #3:

Don’t use AE to compress files for final delivery. The various compressors are there only to make quick ‘n dirty files showing a project’s progress to producers, clients, the kids, etc. AE is incapable of doing multipass encoding, a crucial feature that greatly improves the image quality of H.264 and MPEG-type files in particular.

Render a high-quality file from AE, and use a different application to do the compression. Popular ones are Adobe Media Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze and Apple’s Compressor, which comes bundled with Final Cut Suite. Even compressing in Quicktime Pro is better than compressing in AE.

Making good-looking compressed files is almost as much an art as it is a science. It is NOT straightforward at all. I recommend asking a few questions at the COW’s Compression Techniques forum.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Abhishek,

I think the only thing that might work would be going into your auto-saves and seeing if you still
have a version with your deleted layers.

From the manual-

Auto-saved files are saved in the Adobe After Effects Auto-Save folder, which is located in the same folder as the original project file. Auto-saved filenames are based on the project name: After Effects adds “auto-save n” (where n is the number of the file in the auto-save series) to the end of the filename. Maximum Project Versions specifies how many versions of each project file you want to save. When the number of versions saved reaches the maximum you specify, the Auto-Save feature overwrites them starting with the oldest file.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Dan,
Yes you can Double click the center of the work area bar.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Chris,

Although I have never used it before I have been told that automatic duck is a great product for this.
I just checked there site and it looks like they are updated for CS4 so not sure what you are seeing to think it’s outdated.

Boris also has a new tool called Boris XML I believe. Again I have never used it before.

Personally, I use this free script by Popcorn Island.
You can find it and tutorials for it here
https://www.popcornisland.com/2009/03/final-cut-2-after-effects/

It does not have all the bells and whistles that the other two products have, but I have found it to be robust enough to meet my needs.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Dan Ebberts’s Website is a great resource

https://www.motionscript.com/

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Jeremy,

Ok I understand. Your first method would work if you precompose the animated
layer into a comp tall enough to accommodate the animation. Then in your main
comp just duplicate the precomp, and offset the duplicate in time and space.

Here is a cs4 example-

https://www.chiselindustries.com/Client/rollover.zip

Easy enough as long as you don’t have to do it 100 times-

[Jeremy Buttell] “Regardless, I’d like to know why the image gets cropped when using the transform ‘effect’ ….or probably any other effect. I mean, I’m pretty certain it crops it for performance, but it typically seems like a preference one would have access to.”

I don’t know the inner workings well enough to be supremely confidant about this but
hopefully someone will correct me if im wrong.

I would assume your correct in thinking that after effects does not calculate what’s
outside of a camera’s or 2D compositions boundaries, although Since precompositions always render first,
the information is going to be available wherever it sits in your main comp.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Jeremy,
Can you provide more details about how you are
achieving the “rollover” effect. I’m not sure how the
transform effect would do this on it’s own, unless your
applying it to multiple similar offset layers.

[Jeremy Buttell] “In other words, it seems to be cropping the image about 10-15% outside the composition window.”

Do you mean the image is cropped inside the composition window?
If it’s being cropped outside the window how can you tell?

If I had to take a wild guess I would say that your problem is coming from
something that has been precompesed. Can you provide some more details about
how your composition is set up?

Thanks

-Andy

[Andy George]

[Kevin Hedin] “You just saved me $370 8-)”

Ill split it with you 🙂

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Kevin,

[Kevin Hedin] “Will Open GL work with this card? Or is there a better card I should consider for AE?”

Open GL won’t work well with any Graphics card….It just doesn’t work well.

There’s little gain to updating your graphics card as far as AE is concerned.

-Andy

[Andy George]

That is frickin hilarious!!!!!!!! (and awesome)

Im guessing it’s all flash driven? I can’t imagine you would have time
for anything else. It’s really fast.

-Andy