[Brent Taylor]

I found the answer to this and thought I’d share for anyone who comes after.

Right click > Render and Replace does what I was looking for. You can also nest things first if effects need to be applied to a few bits of audio at once more easily.

[Brent Taylor]

Thanks guys. I’ll look into some of the things you mentioned and get back to you.

I tried the Media Encoder again last night. I realized that while it LOOKS like it hangs when I send the composition for rendering (Windows even tags it as unresponsive), if I’m very patient and wait a few minutes, it does finally go. It does the same thing when I push the render button.

Ended up taking 2 or 3 hours to render about a minute and a half of footage.

Unfortunately the Render has some kind of glitch. There’s a few frames that, for some reason, always render in lower resolution than everything else… odd. This also happened when I saved the RAM preview… can’t figure out what the deal is. Was using the H.264 codec.

Haven’t tried the image sequence. Will have to get back to you on some of the other settings.

[Brent Taylor]

It’s a lot of character animation using .AI layers. A lot of it is in 3D space with Continuous Rasterization on. Some cameras and a little lighting, too. So it can get fairly involved. My specs are like this:

i7 Quad-core 2.4 ghz
12 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FT 640M

Obviously that’s not amazing. It’s all I can afford at the moment, however.

If I tell it to render smaller compositions it does fine, but not entire scenes I’ve set up with multiple character/comps, backgrounds, etc. It just freezes.

I get that the obvious answer is “get a better computer or do simpler stuff.” But I’m hoping that since the RAM preview works just fine, maybe I can get the renderer to do likewise.

[Brent Taylor]

I think Daniel could be right. Try it without the Motion Blur if you have it on.

Here is another hunch: Do you have 2D layers both above and below 3D layers? Sometimes this not only causes weird things to happen, but also, things may render differently than they appear in the preview. Sometimes this applies to comps within comps also. See this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/960801

Still another possibility: Are you using the Collapse Transformations option? Sometimes when you have it on / off it can cause unexpected things when you’re dealing with cameras within cameras (or non-camera layers within camera layers), etc.

I’m still learning the nuances of all these myself but often when I have odd glitches things like this are involved and messing with them can help.

[Brent Taylor]

I’m realizing I might not be using my terminology right. I may have “collapsed” and “uncollapsed” reversed.

The point is that when I have the sun icon off, it takes a set of 3D layers and smashes them into a single 2D thing in 3D space. I like that, but if I scale it up I lose resolution. I’m looking for a way to do that without losing resolution. Is it possible?

The only workarounds I’ve found so far are either to just let it maintain its 3D attributes (fine in some instances) or to have an intermediate composition with 3D attributes where I scale it way up before bringing it into the final one. In the second case full vector is not preserved, but the resolution is generally high enough. Both have drawbacks I don’t really like. 🙁

[Brent Taylor]

You’ve got it Uncollapsed. When the sun icon is visible, 3D space is maintained. That’s the one that always looks good for me. Try it the other way. That’s where I’m having the problem.

[Brent Taylor]

Really? Not here. Here’s pictures of my preview window. Both are at “Full” and displaying the window size at 100%.

8863_notcollapsedlooksgood.png.zip

8864_collapsedlooksbad.png.zip

All I’m doing is toggling that one option. I didn’t touch anything else. Are you sure you looked at it at 100%? It looks fine from a distance. If you are sure, I’d like to know what is different about your system. Maybe there is a setting somewhere I’m not aware of?

[Brent Taylor]

Ok guys. I made a quick file over my lunch break. These are all new assets I threw together for the demonstration. Much simpler than the file in the project, but the exact same results.

AI File: 8860_testcheck.ai.zip

AE File: 8861_collapsetest.aep.zip

Everything is set up so that all you should have to do to see what I’m talking about is toggle the Collapse Transformations button on the “Test Check” precomp layer inside the “Test Check 2” composition.

Notice that within the “Test Check” composition itself, things can be resized to any size without issue (I made a null you can use to confirm this). It’s only when it is increased in size directly in the “Test Check 2” composition that the loss of resolution occurs.

Any ideas?

[Brent Taylor]

It’s definitely not a bitmapped layer, no. It’s vectors from Illustrator. After Effects is successfully scaling the same things things up elsewhere. Just not when it’s contained in a Precomp with Collapse Transformations on.

That is, if the Precomp itself is scaled up there is problem. Not if it was scaled up inside Precomp.

I’ll see if I can come up with an example. The project itself is pretty large so let me try coming up with something that reduces things to the matter at hand.

[Brent Taylor]

Make sure the little speaker icon is present on the layer you want to hear. It’s next to the eyeball icon used to make layers visible / invisible.

If that’s set up properly you can do 3 things to hear your audio:

1) Hold down Control (or Command) and scrub through the audio.
2) Press 0 / Insert on the keypad for a RAM preview
3) Press . / Delete on the keypad for a preview of the audio only.