Angelo Lorenzo
Forum Replies Created
-
What effects won’t apply? Where is your footage originating from? That are your timeline settings (fps and dimensions)?
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
Spoke too soon, looks like they pushed an update to their site. A few spec bumps with the processor but no Thunderbolt, no USB3, no increase in PCIe ports, no case redesign for more drive bays…
Boldly advertising it’s 1.3x faster than the 2010’s with the Xeon E5645 which is two years old. Granted, using the E5 or E7 series means a more expensive tower and they probably wanted to keep price point.
https://gizmodo.com/5917271/the-mac-pro-lives-apple-has-resurrected-one-of-its-most-venerable-lines
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
WWDC has passed, no word as to an updated Mac Pro in their keynote. They might be “quietly” updated but I’m not holding my breathe – happy on my PC workstation.
As an aside, I just noticed the Retina Display logo looks like the old Photoshop v5-6 splash screen eyeball. *shrug*
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
Thunderbolt on PCs are still 6 months behind a workable implementation, be it at controller/driver level. That’s fine, let the market and offerings mature before jumping into such an expensive connection.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
I would apply a curve to the outline layer to make the black and whites as pure as possible (adding contrast basically) then precomp it. I would change the blending mode to darken or multiply on the precomp and that will drop out the white, leaving the black which will allow you to color underneath.
On second thought, using a levels effect and moving the black and white points inward would probably do what you need with less tweaking.
If you’re using sharpie, I doubt you’re doing any subtle shading with ink, so a blending mode will do the job better, produce more reliable results, and render faster than an effect.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
Adobe reps have always been pretty vocal that the more people request a feature or a group of similar features, the more attention is paid. If you want it badly, add a feature request too.
As to how they vet those suggestions after the fact is up to speculation but it, logically, comes down to: how useful is in to the majority of users, is it a deal breaker that might stop a niche market from not buying the software, and how does it consume resources in comparison to the normal updates or features that keep After Effects on track with the competition.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
I’m not a big fan of critical data on RAID 0, so I assume you’re backing projects up on a third slightly less volatile external drive or LTO tape? If you are, then great.
In terms of splitting up the preview files from the footage on the two separate raids, good choice. I would probably put the AE global cache on raid #1 if #2 holds all the media. You want to keep them pinp-ponging when it comes to massive amounts of drive access.
With the 3 drive RAID5 setup, you’ll probably see similar throughput to a 2 drive RAID0 when dealing with audio and video files. RAID5 gets a little slow with smaller writes, but it’s not like you’re running a SQL server.
In terms of what you should get now, I’d at least go for the Quadro 4000. There are some advantages to allowing the Mercury Engine to work in hardware mode; some calculations are just more optimized for the GPU. The Quadro will also aid in raytracing in After Effects if that’s your cup of tea.
You’re there I think, I would just spring for the nVidia GPU.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
Jonnie, I made some assumptions when giving you advice. I wrongly assumed you were given something that was already converted for normal viewing, which would be 1920×1080 square pixel. It looks like, however you’ve been given some assembly cut that isn’t ready for prime time.
If this footage was given to you at 1440×1080 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.33 then it needs to be rendered into DNxHD exactly like that and worked in that format; this format is common from some HD cameras as it’s a way to cheat not having a full HD sensor. When you give the footage to your client, you need to export to 1920×1080 square pixel, removing the artificial stretch, this will make it ready for normal viewing.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
Television cameras originally used analog pickup tubes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube . In specific the Image Orthicon was prone to these issues.
As far as I know it has to do with how slowly the tube dumped the charge, but my experience with tube electronics is highly limited.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services -
To answer your issues in order:
– Yes, Quicktime as a “format” is what you choose. It’s just more commonly referred to a container or container format because, well, it contains audio and video info.
– DNxHD is an intermediate codec, it trades quality and performance for file size. As to why it skips, your system may be under powered (my guess considering how Premiere reacts to H.264) or are you editing off of something slow like a USB external drive? If it works when the timeline is rendered, great; it’ll probably perform better on CS6. For all intent and purpose DNxHD will give you better editing performance with either program in comparison to H.264.
– I’m not sure why you’re experiencing letterboxing. Check your encoding settings again, especially the pixel aspect ratio. If it’s HD footage, you should strictly be working with square(aka 1:1 or 1.0). Also, when ingested back into Premiere, double check the sequence settings as well if you see issues in Quicktime, but it looks fine in Premiere.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services