[Cassius Marques]

what does GenArts plugin has to do with anything? are you using it?

If you are…I know that many of this plugins use opengl assistance by default to speed things up. I don’t think turning it off through AE would meant your are not using your GPU. So maybe it will come up to a bad plugin(reinstall it?) or incompatible/unupdated video driver.

[Cassius Marques]

I have to disagree with you guys, for those “almost” still shots and so few displacement on the bodies. A simple tracking plus some frame to frame retouching on the warps would suffice and it would be faster. Even on the low res video you can notice when the displace looks a bit unreal. For that kinda match, I woulden’t be very scared.

[Cassius Marques]

You’re probably getting black instead of alpha because of some effect you applied on those adjustment layers, you have to make sure to use only effects that can render over transparent, You see the video when it is below everything because you have set them(the effects) to screen.

The worst problem is that you can’t rely on multiple blending modes, the person responsible for compositing it after wont be able to differ the layers and will only be able to set one blending mode. It is going to look different.

Bottom line is from that screenshot you are using the particles set to normal and some random effect to screen… You wont be able to have both…so on that case I suggest rendering 2 files. Particular with alpha and whatever else you’re using screen, over black.

[Cassius Marques]

take a look at the actor’s clothes and use another color for the secondary mattes (I’ve had good results with green and blue) any other color can get mixed with skin tones.

You will have to paint the cellphone blue, just be very carefull with what kind of paint you get, any reflections will come as white and you’ll have a lot of roto to adress that.

[Cassius Marques]

And I’ll have to agree with you…to have a shortcut for it is very handy…

But that shortcut to be default on a key that usualy represents “cancel or deselect” and it changes something some AE users don’t even use or know where it is, is still stupid imho.

[Cassius Marques]

To elaborate even further…

It happens when you accidentaly press the escape key… that got to be the most stupid keyboard shortcut EVER.

[Cassius Marques]

I’m unaware of a way to do it within AE.

I usually just render it out as w/e sequence name I want and then use another software such as ACDsee to batch rename it…

[Cassius Marques]

Maybe you can set everything but the images to Draft, and render full size or half size(full scalled down). I’m just not sure if the draft quality will come close to half, or w/e it’s based on.

[Cassius Marques]

You don’t have to collapse transformations when scalling down a composition. And that wouldn’t speed things up… the render time would be the same as rendering in full res.

[Cassius Marques]

I would simple use AE, no plugins…for that kind of shape, 2 shape layers for front/back, 6 for the extrusion look, a few expressions and you’ll have an editable (color, size) 3d squared baloon.