[Brendan Coots]

Quick note on the hard drive – there is a Seagate 160GB 7200 RPM laptop drive that works fine in either version of the Macbooks. Other World Computing has a decent price:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST9160823AS/

[Brendan Coots]

I totally agree, I think that a lot of this discussion comes down to preference. I suppose my primary point is that most vendors out there tend to market in ways that make people think you simply HAVE to have certain hardware for certain activities.

A good example is this – one benefit touted in the Macbook Pro vs. the standard Macbook is its ability to use up to 3GB RAM. They don’t tell people that you CAN easily install and use 3GB RAM in the Macbook, it just disables Dual Channel memory mode in the integrated graphics card. The performance benefits more than make up for this, but Apple would prefer people spend an extra $1k for the Pro.

Either way, both laptops are great machines and will serve any design professional quite well.

[Brendan Coots]

“For MPEG-2, AE does a good job when compared to other tools. If it’s 8Mbits for an MPEG-2 file, then the file sizes shouldn’t be different between what AE delivers and the other tools. And less visual difference when you’re doing CBR.”

That may be so. I rarely output to anything but uncompressed from AE and prefer using DVD Studio Pro’s MPEG2 encoding, a lesson learned from seeing poor results out of AE one time too many. I should also note that in a recent interview one of Adobe’s own product guys conceded that AE’s compressed output was not up to snuff. I just think it’s safer to use tools designed for compression and let AE do what it’s made for – high quality master files.

I agree that the file size shouldn’t be larger with MPEG2 in particular, but I have noticed quality issues in the final DVDs that weren’t there when DVDSP was allowed to create the MPEG2 instead.

[Brendan Coots]

The other responses here make some good points, but for the record I use a Macbook (white) and frequently take my post-work home with me. This includes After Effects, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Shake and even Maya. The Macbook handles all of them just fine, provided you are a realist and don’t expect octo-Mac Pro performance. That said, it IS speedy enough for everything I’ve thrown at it so far, some apps work better in Parallels (such as Maya) but overall it works great.

To prove the point even further, I got the baseline model with only 1GB RAM and the 80GB hard drive, and it STILL works fine! I plan to eventually throw 3GB of RAM in this puppy, and I’m sure it will work great for years to come.

[Brendan Coots]

Render out of After Effects to Quicktime with Animation codec (or uncompressed AVI), then use the Flash video encoder to convert your render to flash video. If you do not have the Flash Encoder, which comes with Flash, you can use the free and very effective Riva Encoder (link at bottom of post). This workflow is preferable simply because After Effects isn’t the best tool for outputting compressed files, they are almost always larger and lower quality than using an uncompressed file in a third party tool made for compression. I’ve seen tests that prove as much.

Here’s the link for Riva Encoder:

https://www.rivavx.com/?encoder

[Brendan Coots]

If you are using After Effects 7, you should have Keylight which comes on the install disc. It is a really great plugin for dealing with Chroma Key and includes all the tools you would need to pull a decent quality key. There is an easy-to-follow tutorial on Keylight here:

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/colorkey/index.htm

[Brendan Coots]

After Effects is different than editing apps in that it does not preview anything in real-time, without a preview to RAM. You do this by pressing 0 on the numpad.

NOTE – Previewing sound requires AE to spool all sound for the work area you have defined into RAM before loading up any video. Sometimes this can lead you to believe that it is locked up, since it can take several minutes to load all the audio in before it begins loading the video to RAM. The best way to deal with this is to use smaller work areas when previewing comps with sound. AE CS3 has fixed this workflow problem.

[Brendan Coots]

I don’t know if you’re missing something, but if you figure it out let me know! That whole “high quality” thing makes no sense to me.

If you’re using DV, don’t worry quite as much about the quality of the video in your computer, it will always look worse than on a TV screen. The most important part is being able to get a good key with DV footage, which is a whole other can-o-worms.

[Brendan Coots]

My thinking is – hope you have a LOT of insurance 😉

Seriously, I wouldn’t even remotely consider doing this without hiring a trained, professional stunt coordinator and professional drivers.

[Brendan Coots]

Good to hear you plan on upgrading your lights, 2 250 watt lights is far from ideal. Really, a good greenscreen setup should include 2 500 watt softboxes for lighting the greenscreen itself depending on how large it is, plus several lights for your actor – perhaps 1 500-1,000 watt key, 1 500 watt softbox fill, and a 250 watt hairlight. Some people will say this is overkill for digital video, but after years of shooting greenscreen footage I say not. The more lighting the better the resulting key, because you can stop your lens down a lot more and get really sharp, clean footage.

Here are some possible reasons for the problems you’re having:

1. The lower powered lights. The less light you shoot with, the more grain your footage will have. Not much you can do this time around.

2. Did you capture your footage to Quicktime files? If so, one thing you can try is to open a clip, go to WINDOW>SHOW MOVIE PROPERTIES and select the Video Track from the list at the top of this window. A Visual Settings tab will appear. In the bottom right-hand corner of the Visual Setting Tab there is a check box for “High Quality.” make sure that is ticked on. Sometimes this makes a big difference, sometimes none at all.

3. Is it possible that you have Final Cut set up to lower the quality in order to play back in real time? Check your RT settings and put them all at highest quality to make sure this isn’t the problem. If you don’t know how to set this, it’s a little dropdown on the far left of the timeline called RT (at least is was in FCP 5)

4. What codec did you capture to? This info could help a lot in diagnosis.