[Bryan Everett]

I don’t see how this can be anything other than a After Effects CS5 issue. I’m having the same issue with my renders crashing at 2.15GB. This problem was not apparent in CS4 and started immediately after a CS5 upgrade.

It does seem to only happen when you render to a network drive, but the problem absolutely is not with the Xserve or network drive, but a fault somewhere in CS5.

[Bryan Everett]

Not elegant at all when I am dealing with comp sizes over 4K. That’s a ton of storage space for TGA files, but it worked.
I converted my PNG video source to TGA and that along with rendering to the TGA codec has preserved my comp colors across both PC and MAC platforms. It’s unfortunate that other codecs don’t do a good job at this.

Thanks for everyone’s help and input.

[Bryan Everett]

Ok…We’re halfway there. Using TGA and NONE codecs gave me exact matches on both my grayscale bars.png and my color bars.png. Everything matched.
However, I have 1 other element in the same comp that is still not matching. It’s a HD Jumpback (from digital Juice) in the PNG format. The PC render when imported into MAC AE to compare to the original is washed out. The MAC render when imported into PC AE is darker. The gray bars and color bars (in the same render) match perfect.
Now what?

[Bryan Everett]

It doesn’t appear to be the codec. I’ve tried PNG, DV, and PhotoJPG, the results are all the same. I am going to go ahead and try TARGA and Uncompressed, just to verify.

I also don’t see how it could be color calibration of the actual monitor as that is only a visual reference. I could tweak my monitor until everything is washed out, but that won’t change the color vaues of the actual file, only what I am visually seeing on this particular monitor.

I’m going to try a couple more codecs and also render from a different MAC and PC than I was using before and I’ll let you know what I find.
Thanks for everyones input. Keep it coming.

[Bryan Everett]

I went in and set both PC and MAC to use SMPTE-C for the working space and rendered the same Grayscale Bars on both.
I’m getting the same varied results. White and Black stay the same at their respective 255 and 0 but everything in between shifts greatly.
When I bring my MAC render back into AE (on the mac) my mid Gray value remains at 127. When I bring the PC render into my MAC comp to compare the 2, the mid Gray (which started at 127) is now at 97. A whole 30 point luminance shift. However, on the PC side, if I bring my PC render back into my PC comp, the PC luminance values are dead on and when I bring my MAC render into the PC comp to compare, the MAC mid gray value (127 pre-render) is now 155. A 27 point luminance shift. I have opened both renders up outside of AE and compared in QT Player which yeilds the same VERY visible difference. I can’t figure out if this is an AE issue, a QT issue, a platform issue or all of the above.

[Bryan Everett]

Yes, scope in FCP as well as importing both a PC frame and MAC frame back into AE on either platform and using the AE info window to view the RGB values of the sampled pixel, which really isn’t necessary because they are visible quite different.

[Bryan Everett]

Please elaborate on uniform working color space. I’m working in 8 bit per pixel color space on both MAC and PC.