Brendan Coots
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The mac version of Quickbooks is so bad that we returned it and dug up an old PC just for Quickbooks use.
I will say that Quickbooks is an excellent option if you need a solid, proven accounting system. While it doesn’t require an accounting degree to use it, there is a learning curve and you CAN screw EVERYTHING up if you don’t know what you’re doing. Quicken may be the same, I’ve never used it.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
If your surface layer does in fact have some sort of caustic effect, your precomp method will do the trick. However, you will probably want to put the precomped caustic layer in some sort of blending mode like Add, Screen or Overlay and probably reduce the opacity somewhat.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You’ll want the bigger/slightly faster drive for media (of course you REALLY want a bigger drive, ideally a small RAID setup, but I’m sure you know that).
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Most of the really good keying apps look at the difference in color values between two adjacent pixels to determine the key. When you select your green background in Keylight, it compares the RGB values of that selected color to every pixel in your frame to determine what should be keyed out and what should stay. Any pixel that falls too far outside of your selected BG color stays while everything else is keyed out. Therefore, applying color correction (of any sort) to the footage before keying will NOT change your situation in the slightest. If you boost the blues, all pixels shift toward blue and their relationship stays the same. This applies to any type of color treatment.
Your best bet might be to do one or all of the following:
– Follow Aharon Rabinowitz’s brilliant Super Tight Junk Mattes tutorial. This will limit the amount of poorly lit blue/greenscreen background that Keylight must deal with, allowing you to use milder settings that degrade your footage less.
– DV is notorious for chroma artifacts, which is probably the main reason for your troubles. Precompose your raw, un-keyed greenscreen footage. Within this new comp, create an adjustment layer above the footage, and apply the “Median” effect (Effects > Channel > Median). There is only one value to play with, change it to 3 or so. Put the adjustment layer in “Color” blending mode. This whole process will remove/smooth some of the artifacting in your footage and make for a better key. You will need to apply Keylight directly to this composition (nest it within another comp), NOT the source footage within the comp.
– To retain fine hair detail, you typically need much more delicate settings than are needed to key sleeves or pants, and one keyer setting applied to both will force you to compromise the quality of both.
For each area that should have its own specific settings you will need to duplicate your footage comp and use masks so that each layer represents one element. This way you have one layer that is just the head, one layer for the clothing etc. Then apply different keyer settings to each layer to suit its needs. You will need to animate these masks (depending on what happens in your shots) but again, this is how the pros do it and if you want the best results, this is a good place to start.Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I would follow Tim’s advice for sure.
As a side note, I have found that “straight” alpha channels tend to work better since there is no premultiplication with white or black (which could be an issue if you have white titles with black drop shadows, etc) and straight alpha usually results in cleaner edges. Just my two cents!
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I just recently witnessed this business model fail after two years of struggle, and they serious money, serious gear and a lot of high level contacts.
I agree with the other posters, it might be a little too limiting given that most people handle their own compression in-house.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
This has been coming up a lot lately here on the cow. Even if you could get the proxie setup working to your liking, you wouldn’t be very stoked at render time when it simply refuses to do your bidding once the real files are inserted, and you have to scramble for a solution that doesn’t involve starting over from scratch.
In my experience, and from what a LOT of posts here have indicated, working with 10Kx4K PSDs with 40-50 layers is not practical in AE. Think of it like this – An uncompressed video file can be huge, 100GB even, but AE can handle it fine because the average data rate per frame is only around 2MB or so. With a Photoshop file, the burden on your machine is the size of the photoshop file per frame. If it’s a 100MB file, that’s 100MB per frame, the equivelent of having 50 different uncompressed videos stacked in your timeline and playing at once.
The datarate per frame is simply too massive, AE’s frame buffer will complain loudly with files of such large physical dimensions, and you will lose all interactivity as the program struggles to handle it all. Even with proxies, once the real elements are swapped in you will be lucky (to say the least) if it actually renders without throwing constant errors, much less finishes rendering sometime this year.Here’s a few options:
– In Photoshop, output each layer to its own file as a PNG with alpha. Reassemble in AE comps. Depending on what these elements are, this could be enough on its own by reducing your total data rate needs considerably.
– Any files that HAVE to be so physically large should probably be broken apart, in Photoshop, into smaller segments that are then output to PNG format and then reassembled into one big comp within AE. This way you still have your high res plates, but each individual chunk will not strain the frame buffer limitations so hard.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
The most common method is to design for your largest or most complex need and go from there. For example, the Standard Definition DVD spec calls for 720×480 video, nothing else will do. Based on this, you should probably design your project at 720×480.
Once the project has been approved, output your 720×480 video to the Animation codec to use as your master. From this file you can create every file you need to deliver. Your DVD authoring software will create all the necessary files from this Animation codec master, and you can use Quicktime Pro or a free program like Super C (scroll to bottom of page for download link) to encode the video to various web/other formats as needed.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I’ve never seen any books that deal with post-production project management. Unfortunately it’s something that is learned through trial and error and being part of animation teams, picking up on what works and what doesn’t.
If you ever DO find any books on the subject, let us know – I’m sure a lot of people here on the Cow would be interested.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
What is the average, actual file size of your PSD files? One thing to keep in mind (I touched on this in another thread just days ago) is that After Effects can easily handle a 10GB animation codec quicktime, because the datarate per frame is only around 2MB or so. But with a large single-frame item like a PSD file, it is my understanding that it loads the full size of the image per frame. This means that a 100MB PSD file is treated as a 100MB per frame video file (50x the data rate of an animation codec video) which leads to drastic throughput issues.
Either way, using smaller versions of layers as proxies is not ideal. You will need to create sub-comps for each layer that is the size your “real” layer will be, scale up the small proxie item to match the final size, animate them all within a master comp, then go in and replace your small proxies with the full size layers when done. At this stage, your renders will be painful at best.
The best method might be to export each layer of your PSD (from within Photoshop) to PNG files or other lossless format, import them into AE, and reassemble them into comps/subcomps as needed. With 8k images (I assume you mean 8,000×8,000 pixels) you will hit AE’s image buffer wall eventually. A strategy for this is to use Photoshop’s guides to grid out your document into, say, 2,000×2,000 squares, and output each layer as a series of chunks that you then reassemble in a subcomp within After Effects. This way, each file it has to manage is much smaller but the end result is identical. Combine this with using PNGs for each chunk and you might get some usability back in AE. It sounds like a lot to go through, but it’s quicker and less frustrating than most of the alternatives.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com