[Barend Onneweer]

And…

You can store up to 4 snapshots, since Shift-F5 to Shift-F8 are for creating a snapshot, and F5 to F8 bring up the snapshot.

I’d only wish there were more… But it’s very handy when doing color grading.

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You need OpenGL 2.0 to benefit from high-fidelity OpenGL preview.

[Jimmy D] “Also, using this Graphic card would I be able to connect two monitors one CRT analoge input and one TFT digital input?”

Should be perfectly possible. Make sure you get a graphics board with 2 outputs. Mine has two DVI outputs with VGA converters. So yes you can connect one VGA and one DVI output at the same time. As long as you make sure you get the right model.

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[alon_a] “If I’m wrong here, someone will probably correct me :-)”

Well, I haven’t checked the last generation of ATI drivers, but most people go with nVidia for After Effects 7. Depending on the type of project and the resolution, a good OpenGL board can speed up the previews a lot.

I currently use a 6800GT with 256MB RAM. The board runs out of RAM quickly when doing 2k comps, so I tend to disable OpenGL preview when doing complex composites in HD or 2k. But for SD projects it speeds up the workflow very well.

I imaging having 512 MB of memory on the graphics board will help. Currently I’d recommend a good gaming card such as the 6800GT or upwards (7800 would do quite well).

Another example: I just did a test with the OpenGL accelleration of Magic Bullet Looks Suite. Enabling GPU in the plugin decreased the rendertime to 10% of the CPU-only rendertime.

So my dual Opteron system did the preview in over 6 minutes. Enabling GPU in the plugin resulted in a 40 second preview.

Oh… and the nVidia drivers have useful dual-display settings.

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[crgreen] ”
Actually, PFHoe is the most affordable one …”

Ah… true. And it looks like a great deal if you work with SD video.

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Syntheyes is the most affordable one, ($399) and has an After Effects export module.

But most 3D trackers will either export to After Effects, or a Maya file, that can be imported into After Effects.

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I think all AE plugins are written in some flavour of C.

What you want is called “macro’s” in Shake, and “capsules” in Combustion. You build a concoction of existing plugins, build a custom UI around it (similar to expression controls), and wrap it into a single item.

But AE doesn’t do this. Sending in feature requests may help though 🙂

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I think all AE plugins are written in some flavour of C.

What you want is called “macro’s” in Shake, and “capsules” in Combustion. You build a concoction of existing plugins, build a custom UI around it (similar to expression controls), and wrap it into a single item.

But AE doesn’t do this. Sending in feature requests may help though 🙂

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Tim… if you’re reading this, what system were you using for the benchmark, and what kind of resolution were you working on?

And did you render Magic Bullet Look Suite with GPU enabled? Because if you have a decent graphics board, Look Suite soars! Just a quick comparison:

PAL comp, 7 seconds long:
Look Suite (Crime Scene preset)

On my dual Opteron 244, it renders in 6min10sec
On the same machine with GPU enabled (nVidia 6800GT), it renders in 41 seconds!

That’s without Magic Bullet de-interlacing and de-artifacting. The de-interlacer is still slow.

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First of all, educational Adobe licenses are ‘for life’. So you can keep using the software you bought at educational prices forever.

You can also upgrade your educational software to a full commercial license when a new version comes out. Usually for the standard upgrade fee.

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How XP on a MacBook performs, compared to OSX on the same hardware remains to be seen. But it’s no emulation. XP runs like it would on any other Intel Core Duo chip.

I’ve heard from a couple of people here in The Netherlands that just loaded XP on their MacBook or iMac. XP seems to boot a tad slower than expected, and the ATI display card performs around half of what the same card does on a typical Windows machine.

This is probably because the ATI card in the Apple systems has different firmware than on other machines, so the regular ATI drivers won’t work. Apple supplies their own graphics card drivers for XP, with Bootcamp. But as said, they’re slow at the moment. But this may well change in the future.

All secondhand insight on my part though. But it sure sounds like a pretty good deal.

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