Brian Charles
Forum Replies Created
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Walter is correct that drive speed makes application launches snappier and if you intend to capture video from tape via Firewire a faster drive will lessen the likelihood of dropped frames.
I have a 10k rpm in my MacPro and its great, but it doesn’t do anything to speed renders.
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Render times (speed) depend on the complexity of the project, effects that are used, processor speed and RAM. There is no single factor that will guarantee fast render times. In general (having no experience on the particular machine you are using) more memory and faster CPU’s do speed render. The drive speed is not much of a factor here other than for spitting out or capturing video.
I’ve got a dual core MacBook and an 8 core Mac Pro. Both can use all cores for rendering though my MacBook is hobbled by the amount of RAM it can access, with only 4GB installed. Each core should have 3GB *and* the computer should have additional RAM to take care of the OS and any other open applications. I know the MacBook can now take 8GB of RAM, that should provide you with more benfit for render times than a fast drive. As for CPU clock speed — 3.06 GHz is only about 10% faster than 2.8 GHz. So a 10 minute render might be 60 seconds faster, if that’s significant for you then it may make sense to spring for the faster CPU.
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If I understand your question, you need to produce a 4×3 version of a 16×9 animation without any letter boxing or side pillars.
A simple way to do this is to put the 16×9 Composition (or better still the 16×9 render) into a 4×3 NTSC Composition and scale it to fit the height. Then render.
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No worries. I just searched the Cow and see that Aharon Rabinowitz has 3 tutorials on displacement maps, might be a good place to start.
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/displacement1.php
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I posted an example after effects file in the post prior to the last one. Its done in CS4. You should be able to open it in After Effects.
Here is the link: 464_fabricdisplacefolder.zip
To create the effect I used the curtains animation preset and made a few adjustments. I removed the tritone effect and changed the brightness and contrast settings to taste. Then I added an expression to drive the evolution basically “time*50”.
I precomped that layer and added the fabric image (you could precomp the fabric with your logo on top) and then applied the Displacement Map effect setting the displace layer to the fractal noise precomp and using the luminance from that layer to drive bot the horizontal and vertical displacement. I think I used a setting of 3 or 4 in each dimension. Those settings would need to change depending on your footage and comp size.
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Low res coarse fabric sample.
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Depending on how you want the fabric to look you can use several techniques that don’t rely on 3rd party plug ins.
You’ll need to create a displacement map using either fractal noise or wave world. What you want is a gray scale image showing the the light and shadow of the fabric, you can use the evolution options in Fractal Noise to animate. Look for tutorials on curtains etc there are several out there including a new one on the Cow. Once you have the displacement map looking the way you want apply the Diplacement Map effect to the fabric layer and set the displacement map layer to the fractal layer.
To add shading you can composite the fabric with the fractal layer. Here is a sample in CS4.
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Here’s a map for the soccer ball that won’t show a seam.
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You need to select the opacity property for the layer with the expression then choose Copy Expression Only then paste.
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If you’re on a Mac (you mention the dock) hold down the Command + Option + Shift keys as you start After Effects, this will allow you to delete the corrupt preference file. On a PC its Control + Alt + Shift.