Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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The 8-core Macs are roughly 35% faster than quad-cores when rendering with After Effects CS3. Apple just made octo-core the standard configuration for the Mac Pro and dropped the price in the process making them even more attractive.
Bear in mind that processor speed is still far more important than number of cores when it comes to general use, those additional cores are really only helpful when it comes time to render. I would get the highest Ghz rating (3.2Ghz ideally) you can afford, especially for HD work. You should also stock it up with 8-16GB RAM. If this seems cost-prohibitive given Apple’s grossly overpriced memory, get OWC RAM from Other World Computing for half price.
Often overlooked in the performance department is a 10k RPM main hard drive and separate 10k RPM cache drive. A 4+ drive RAID 5 system for media and project files would also increase performance. And finally, keep # of installed files to a minimum, ample room on all drives and frequently repair your disk permissions etc.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Darby is dead on, as usual. I agree 100%
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I agree with Walter, Filemaker Pro is a great option provided you can handle building out a database or are willing to pay someone who can. It is very flexible, in fact you can (with a good programmer) even log and capture video right into a Filemaker database. You can integrate it directly with Avid. You can tie scripts to frames of video and storyboards, so that everything is synced up and easy to find. Needless to say, all of this requires extensive development but Filemaker developers can be found all over the world, and at fairly reasonable rates. You can start out with your basic, initial needs and add on as you grow.
Another option might even be Adobe Web Premium. It has Adobe Premiere which could be used for editing/manipulating media. It has Dreamweaver, Flash and Contribute which can be used to encode and upload videos, and it has Adobe Bridge which can be used for local management of videos stills and project media in a visual, keyword-based way.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
It’s a question that would be impossible to answer fairly, because it completely depends on dozens of factors such as skill level, local market, competition, economic conditions, timing etc.
The issue usually starts to get emotionally charged because people who are in a hiring position read a poster’s lack of knowledge about rate as a lack of experience, and suggest they ask for a fairly low rate. Freelancers, on the other hand, tend to suggest the poster charge a much higher rate that gives personal need much more weight than factors like skill and speed. It becomes a standoff not unlike the Mac/PC debate.
I was a freelancer for 5 years and now I am in charge of hiring – from this dual-perspective, I think you had better really, really know how to deliver high quality work if you are going to charge people $125/hour, regardless of market and other factors. Sure one could argue that you need X amount to live comfortably and pay your taxes, etc. but no one, myself included, is guaranteed a living wage “just because.” You must be competitive either in price or quality if you expect to lead a comfortable living.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
As I mentioned it’s just the way it’s embedded into the web page, that method is basically deprecated and most modern browsers won’t (and cannot legally) support it.
And Randy, you’re right Flash video is probably much safer, and very high quality to boot. I should have mentioned that.
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It’s a YUV/RGB issue, as in FCP works in YUV space while After Effects works in RGB space. In certain circumstances, depending on what you do to the footage in AE it can clip on re-import. I am tired and honestly don’t remember the workaround, but a search on Google should give you some ideas.
Also, I would definitely use ProRes422 or some other codec besides DVCPROHD for those round trips (don’t know if you already are, doesn’t say in your post), DVCPROHD is lossy, after all.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
This topic looks about beat to death, but I just have to weigh in:
1. I checked your video on both a PC and a Mac, using Safari and Firefox – the video would not play on either platform. The problem, at least in part, is the method/code you have used to embed it into your web page and has nothing to do with your visitor’s computers or OS. That method of embedding is no longer supported by any mainstream browser due to a lawsuit a few years back. Read this link to understand what is going wrong and how to fix it. Yes it’s an Apple/Quicktime site, but it applies to ALL embedded media including WMV, on ALL platforms.
2. Using WMV is a bad idea for at least one reason – not everyone has or uses Windows Media Player. You say 99% of your customers and potential customers are on Windows, but that is just ridiculous. First of all, there is no way for you to know that. Secondly, you may get 1,000 visits a day from “potential customers” who, being Mac users, leave and never look back simply because they cannot view your work. Unless you own stock in Microsoft or something, why risk alienating customers? There are many options out there, but MPEG-4 based Quicktime files have the widest support of any format, primarily because both Mac and PC users can see them.
3. As someone who came from a web design background, I have to agree that your site could use some work. I know that’s not why you came here, but the rates you can get away with charging are directly related to the impression you leave on potential customers. If the design of your site isn’t as good as it could be, people will assume your work isn’t so hot either (especially if they can’t see your demo reel!!!) Don’t be offended by people’s comments on this, they are only trying to help you succeed. In today’s marketplace, people are fully used to and expect to see well designed, easy to navigate, highly polished web sites. Play the game or get left behind, straight up.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
A little more complicated indeed… Such as, where is the “How good are you at what you do?” multiplier?
Needless to say this is a great tool to figure up what you NEED to make based on expenditures, but that doesn’t mean it’s a realistic rate to charge clients.
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This is a job for a motion graphics artist, not a 3D artist. It should take them about one full day to do it, and, depending on what market you are in, should cost about $45/hr for the level of talent you would need to do this reasonably well.
The process involves creating a series of zoom-within-a-zoom type effects using After Effects and high resolution stills from NASA. Just for the record, everything from Google Earth is copyrighted, even with the Pro version:
“…you cannot sell these to others, provide them as part of a service, or use them in a commercial product such as a book or TV show without first getting a rights clearance from Google.
If you require these commercial rights, please visit Google’s permissions guidelines. “
https://earth.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21422
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
“I would probably stick to Windows since all my other software/plug-ins are windows and I presume I can’t split the license – or can I?”
Doubtful. As for the license including 2 users, that would only be for the same platform (the serial numbers issued to you are platform specific).
“But are there any compatibility issues of moving a Windows created AE project to a Mac AE version? “
Not that I’ve ever encountered and I do it often. You would of course need all of the exact same fonts and plugins used in your project on both the Windows/OSX installs.
“I presume there is no problem with the Mac running 64-bit.”
OSX is a 64-bit OS so no, a Mac shouldn’t have any issues.
“generally it doesn’t appear that a Mac Pro running BootCamp has drivers to fully benefit from 64-bit. “
That may be true, honestly I haven’t tried installing XP 64-bit on Boot Camp. Then again, I don’t use the Windows side of my Macs for things that would utilize 64-bit anyway, such as RAM intensive applications. You may want to research this more, but even XP 32-bit will work fine and give you access to 3GB RAM, which isn’t horrible unless you are doing heavy Maya work or something.
“Say I had a quad core Mac with 8Gb of RAM and was running XP 64 bit via BootCamp, would each core be allocated 2Gb of Ram?”
No, because CPUs aren’t allocated RAM. Each process (i.e. application) would be allocated 2GB RAM. After Effects CS3 can use so much memory simply because it spawns up to 3 additional of copies of AE (one AE copy per CPU core) in the background, invisible to the user, all working together to render your files but each seen by Windows as a separate process and therefore getting more RAM into your AE renders.
“If I went 8 core would 32-bit be better or would it still only “see” 3Gb of Ram? Does the Mac OS make a difference (is Leopard better than Tiger)?”
32-bit would be fine, but yes it would only see 3GB RAM no matter how many cores you pop in, since this is a limitation of the OS not the computer specs. A 32-bit OS can only see 4GB of RAM no matter what, and Windows reserves a set amount of that RAM for itself, leaving only 3GB or so to allocate to applications. It should also be noted that 99% of the applications out there are only 32-bit as well, and therefore can’t use gobs of memory just because you have it. Only 3D applications and other high end, memory-hungry apps are 64-bit.
Windows 64-bit and all versions of OSX since v10.0 are 64-bit, and therefore aren’t constrained by this 4GB RAM limitation – they can see up to 16 exabytes of RAM. Not that it matters today since most modern computers have a physical and logistical limitation of 8-16GB.
As for the 8-core question, you would need 2GB RAM per CPU core to really see performance gains from those 8 cores, and even then so few applications could take advantage of that setup that you would see diminishing returns in terms of cost/performance benefit. If it were me, I would stick to the quad-core, 8GB+ RAM setup given its cost/benefit ratio.
And no, the Mac OS doesn’t matter in terms of what will happen inside of Windows (RAM allocation issues, etc.) With Boot Camp, you are completely booting from startup into Windows and OSX has no part in it. When you restart your machine you are given the option of booting into Windows Or OSX.
One other option you may consider here is VMWare Fusion which I have installed on a few machines. It allows you to fire up Windows from within OSX, just like any other application. It opens Windows in a new window which can be small or full screen, it can access all the same hardware as OSX etc. but it doesn’t require you to restart you computer etc. You can even have a share folder between OSX and your Windows/VMware so moving files between the two is simple. This way, you can be editing in FCP, pop open VMWare/Windows to work on that graphic in your Windows-licensed copy of After Effects, export it and drop it into the share folder and instantly import it into FCP without missing a beat.
Fusion doesn’t sap system resources at all, when it is running the program itself only uses 30MB RAM in addition to whatever Windows draws. You can also set how much of your RAM will be allocated to Windows vs. OSX, how many processors etc. And no, I don’t own stock in the company, I just like this product.Definitely worth looking into, I like it much better than Boot Camp myself.