[Barend Onneweer]

You can’t control the actual mask shape directly, but you can control the solid that the shape is on. Or am I misunderstanding your goal?

Barend

[Barend Onneweer]

Sounds like first you need to stabilize your “B-eyes” so they stay in static position. You probably need to stabilize scale, rotation and position. I’d precompose the result.

Then track the A-eyes and apply the tracking data to the precomped B-eyes.

Of course this is the general approach and depending on the details of the footage you’ll run into problems that will need smoothing out.

Hope this helps,

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

I couldn’t watch the quicktimes because I’m in iPhone with slow connection.

First, I’d try Mocha AE for tracking – gives better results and is bundled with CS4.

If that’s not an option: try smoothing keyframes using either an expression or the Smoother. That usually removes some of the jitter that comes from tracking compressed material. Personally I often add a subtle amount of Remove Grain before tracking to smooth out chroma subsampling. Or only track the green channel (which is usually cleanest) by using Shift Channels and substitute G for R and B > precompose and track.

Hope this helps.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Without knowing the details about your comps, it’s hard to tell how your comps could be optimized. But optimizing and rendering proxies etc. also takes time so for this time you might be best off just hitting the render button.

It does sound like a lot of data for a project – and the harddisk may be part of the bottleneck. If the disk is too slow or RAM is low then the CPU can’t be loaded to 100%. Adding RAM may helpt.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

I’ve coordinated many projects where we had multiple animators/compositors collaborate like this. Like David suggests I start out designing a master project template that has all footage, source materials, and some compositions prepared. Forcing one workflow for all animators will ensure consistent looks and specs – and probably save a lot of time setting up.

We usually piece together the edit along the way, parallel to animating. Every night we’ll render what we’ve got, sketches and finals. We place them in the edit to get a feel for the flow and consistency. That way we don’t get surprises on the final day and we spread rendering over the project time.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Is your AE 4 on the same machine? It sounds like a missing codec. QuickTime is a wrapper (.mov) that can use a wide variety of codecs, not all of them standard, or even crossplatform. Sounds like your camera records to some codec that needs to be installed on your system.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

You can basically convert your foreground layer to a 3D layer, and parent it to AE’s 3D camera. You’ll have to manually position and orient the layer relative to the camera, since your cam will not be in default position anymore.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

My first thought would be faulty RAM or a codec error, probably the last.

If you check the frames where it usually hangs and delete one layer at a time to see if it will render then – you might find the problem layer. You might be able to convert that layer into an uncompressed QuickTime to see if I helps.

Alternatively, render to image sequence with ‘skip existing frames’ enabled. After the render hangs, you can fire off the same render and it will continue where it stoppe last time. Sometimes this will do the trick. Before re-starting the render I usually manually delete the last rendered frame because it may be corrupted.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Actually, the screenshot shows that the composition is rendered to a RAM preview but the RAM preview still isn’t playing back at full fps.

The main cause for this would be the odd zoom setting (94%) which forces a re-scale of the image which isn’t realtime.

Try setting your comp view to 100%.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

On the rendering side in AE the graphics card does close to nothing. The occasional plugin will use the GPU but in general you’re better off getting a fast CPU, fast RAM on a fast system buss (the i7 will offer that) than a Quadro card.

For After Effects anyway.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects