Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
-
I am probably completely alone here, but I don’t fully understand why people don’t just buy the components to their system separately via apple.com and B&H, for example. Sure you wouldn’t have 90 days of support from a single source, but their baseline mac pro editing system ($5,995) comes with, by my calculation, an $800 or so markup. Is 90 days of third-party support worth $800?
Now, before anyone gets mad at me, I know a lot of people here have a special place in their hearts for Promax, and I’m not trying to single them out, just wondering if I’m missing a bigger point here.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Two people so far have said to color correct your footage before keying, but this is actually a bad idea (sorry!).
Keylight is a color difference keyer, meaning it compares your chosen “key” color to the color of every pixel in your image. if a pixel’s color is too “different” (determined by your threshold settings) then it is not keyed.
Since color correction affects all pixels equally (for the most part), the relationship between key color and everything else is exactly the same as before, so there is no actual, mathematical benefit to the end result. Actually, by color correcting first you will degrade your image (all color correction tools degrade footage to a degree) so the keyer is a little less likely to do a good job.Also, the notion of blurring your background isn’t a plausible solution. A good key is all about the edge of your actor. If you were able to mask out the actor so the blur only affected the background, and very cleanly came right up to the actor’s edge, then you’d be on to something. But, at that point, you’d have a great roto so why bother keying at all?
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I agree. As it relates to our industry, I can’t imagine being so paranoid and unsure of my own future as to require a non-compete of my employees, freelancers and sub-contracted studios.
Sometimes my studio is asked to sign a non-compete BEFORE signing an NDA, so you don’t even know who the “client” is that they expect you to throw away.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You’re not going to get much of a performance boost in After Effects from your video card, unless you go big and purchase a workstation card like one of the nVidia Quadros or an ATI FireGL. The only benefit you will get from your graphics card in After Effects is the ability to preview using OpenGL which can speed things up. Problem is, many people report that it’s buggy, not all it’s cracked up to be and not really worth spending extra money on a graphics card for.
If you want to boost performance, making sure your machines have the maximum amount of supported RAM is always nice. Faster hard drives help as well.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Oops, I didn’t realize the poster needed to render this out with alpha. I thought he was just trying to get the flare to extend beyond his lower third element!
My bad.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Apply the lens flare effect to a full screen black solid placed above your lower third element, then put the black solid in Screen or Add blending mode.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You must use the Multiprocessing feature in AE CS3 to use more RAM. Multiprocessing silently spawns a new background instance of After Effects for each processor you have, provided you have at least 1-2GB RAM per CPU core. This is how it gets around the RAM limit per application, by spawning many instances of the application and combining the efforts of those instances.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I agree, your best bet might be to use MobileMe. Any service that doesn’t require an account will ALSO allow any old joker to view your calendars, which may or may not be a good idea depending on what you are using the calendars for.
With MobileMe, you can put your iCal calendars online, share them with clients/contractors etc. with minimal effort. Like Zane mentioned, you also get some nice online storage etc.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
RAID 5 is superior to RAID 0 when it comes to redundancy, but not when it comes to speed. In a setup with limited drive space (i.e. anything but an external enclosure) the speed of RAID 5 won’t be so hot.
Everyone has their preference (and none are wrong) but I think smaller systems are better off with RAID 0 and routine backups.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
If you do ANYTHING with the drives separately, you will lose all the data on them. RAID 0 is extremely risky, in that if anything goes funky you immediately lose all data. A power outage could definitely lead to this, and I hate to say it but you’re probably hosed.
When using RAID 0 for anything, always do frequent backups to a different drive.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com