Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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I know life would be much easier if you could do it all within AE, but it really does make sense that they focus on high level features rather than try to build in good support for the many thousands of codecs out there, many of which would require Adobe to license them for each and every copy of AE sold. In that light, it’s not solely Adobe’s fault.
If you need an external app for the conversion to Divx that doesn’t cost too much, check out Super C. It’s totally free, and converts video to a wide range of formats including Divx. The only problem is you have to dig around on their site to get the download link, they always move it around due to problems with people (like me) hotlinking directly to it!
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Are you sure you’re shooting 1920×1080? I ask because virtually no prosumer or lower cameras shoot in true 1920×1080. Most HD-based prosumer cameras, whether they are DVCPRO HD based or HDV, shoot at 1440×1080 and use a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio in post to make the video 1920 wide.
You need to figure out what your source format really is before anyone could answer your question accurately.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Unfortunately most of the cost-effective keying options are plugins for After Effects, Keylight being at the top of the list since it comes free with AE.
Don’t know if you’ve seen Jim Harvey’s writeup on FXHome products, but it’s a good primer. Outside of his article I’ve never heard of their products being used in a professional production, but if your budget is tight it may be an option.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
AE Multiprocessing really needs a full 2GB RAM per CPU core to really use all four processors. You can dial the memory allotted to each core really low, essentially forcing it to use all your cores, but with each getting so little RAM you probably won’t see any performance gain.
Unfortunately, being on a 32-bit system limits what you can do to improve this. The short answer is that AE Multiprocessing is, for the most part, a 64-bit OS feature (XP/Vista 64-bit or OSX).
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Casey,
As Dave Laronde pointed out to you earlier, you are going about things in a way that is going to cause you far more headaches than anything.
1. After Effects doesn’t deal well with files like MP3, Divx etc. because those formats require the host program to read more than one frame at a time to interpret them. After Effects (and most editing programs) are built to only read one frame of data at a time, so they have major issues with these files.
2. After Effects is a horrible choice for rendering out compressed “delivery” files like Divx. Because it is a professional application, the developers seem to spend very little time on things like support for every compression option under the sun, and more time on features that broadcast and other “pro” users will take advantage of.
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The way to achieve what you need, as Dave pointed out, is to render from AE to an uncompressed codec (or even better, a lossless codec like the Animation Codec) and then feed that file to a compression program meant for the sort of thing you are trying to achieve, such as Divx Pro. Adobe Media Encoder may support Divx as well, I haven’t really used it for anything but Blu Ray so I wouldn’t know.Trust me, and Dave, there is a RIGHT way and a wrong way to get results from After Effects.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Do a forum search for pricing – this question has been asked and answered hundreds of times in the past year alone.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Recessions are always a good time to go (back) to school as well…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You can also try rendering it out to 50% or less of its original size, then reimport it and scale it back up. This will introduce some blocky edges and quality reduction.
One of the more noticeable differences between film and DV is their response to color and light, which you can fake with the Levels, Exposure and Hue/Saturation effects:
– DV typically has slightly less saturated color. You can achieve this by reducing overall saturation
– reds tend to bleed and over-saturate pretty badly. Little more difficult to fake
– DV shots tend to look much cooler and lean toward blue. Use Levels to up the blues very slightly, particularly in the mids and highs
– Highlights rarely blow out on film in normal shooting situations, whereas DV highlights blow out very quickly and shadows are more milky in appearance. Use the Exposure effect until the highlights are more blown out. You might also want to add Levels on top of this and bring the Output White down slightly to get that flat, muddy white that is more typical of DV.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
More often than not, intermittent glitch frames within AE mean corrupted buffered frames. Simply purging the RAM cache within AE will almost always clear these issues up.
That said, I don’t really use dynamic link so I’m not sure if this fix would apply in your situation, but it’s worth a shot. Not in front of AE right now but I believe you can find it under Edit>Purge>Purge All.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Ditto on all of the above, esp. the part about codecs. If your files are HDV, convert them to Animation Codec or something before using in After Effects – or any editing app, for that matter – HDV is a shooting codec, not a post codec and AE usually chokes on it pretty hard.
If you do a proper RAM preview it SHOULD play every frame, even if it can only preview a few seconds. That said, dual core with 2GB RAM is a little underpowered for HD work, especially when you are adding calculation-intense effects like Gaussian Blur.
Try using Fast Blur instead, it is basically the same exact visual result but with much less computational load.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com