[Chad Gilmour]

FYI, in response to my post if anyone is looking for a similar fix to the overheating card, we ended up using a card slot above to hold a fan directly over the chip and pulled power from an empty hard drive bay, it actually kept cooler than when the mac fans were running full on.

[Chad Gilmour]

I FIGURED IT OUT!!!! It turns out it wasn’t such big problem after all, it appears Alpha channel interpretation was to blame… …not sure why I didn’t think of that to begin with.

In case anyone else happens to run into this same problem I figured I should post the solution.

So my problem originally was Adobe CS4 not recognizing the video from an Animation Codec Quicktime file exported from AVID. The problem was that I was exporting the color depth as “Millions of colors +” which means I was exporting with an alpha channel, even though, as far as AVID was concerned, all the pixels were opaque. After Effects obviously can handle this, I just had to adjust how it interpreted the alpha channel.

It appears Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t know what to do with alpha channel information, so it automatically made all the pixels transparent (just like AE did), but with no way of changing how it interprets alpha channels, I figured it was screwed up.

THE SOLUTION: was to change the color depth when I export out of AVID as “Millions of colors”. With no alpha channel data the Adobe Media Encoder saw all the pixels as they should be and now all is well with the universe… …for now….

Thanks for the help, ideas, and tips from everyone.

[Chad Gilmour]

I tried that codec, but it didn’t work, CS4 still doesn’t see the actual video of Animation codec quicktimes. That download was for Avid codecs, and I’m pretty sure Animation isn’t an Avid codec, but I could be wrong. It’s an insane thing because if I open the clips up in quicktime I can see the video just fine, and I can see the video in CS3 applications, but not CS4. Is there another uncompressed codec that isn’t an Avid codec, like the Animation codec?

Thanks,

[Chad Gilmour]

“Adobe CS4 doesn’t NOT like working on AMD Processors”

Yet another good tip, but not the issue, we are using Intel processors. Although, I’m definitely filing that one away and mentioning it to our I.S. Director, so the next batch of computers we get won’t have that issue. Are you experiencing similar issues with your AMD processors?

I wonder if it’s a graphics card issue? There’s probably 3 different graphics cards spread out across the 6 computers, so I’m sure it’s not related to a specific card or driver perhaps, but they are all Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, could that be it?

[Chad Gilmour]

“Did you install quicktime AFTER you installed CS4?”

Thanks for the tip, I’m certain we installed quicktime BEFORE CS4, but that at least gives me something to mention to our engineers. I wish we had Macs, oh well.

Has anyone else run into this issue?

[Chad Gilmour]

hmmm… my last work used Episode, I didn’t realize it cost that much though, I tried the FFMPEGx but couldn’t get it to work, maybe I’ll have to browse the forums there a bit.

Thanks for the help.

[Chad Gilmour]

Well that certainly makes sense, I guess I just had unrealistic expectations then.
Is there a FLV encoder that works better than the one that comes with Flash?

[Chad Gilmour]

Thanks the tips, I bookmarked those tables and I’ll definitely be using and sharing them. Unfortunately I don’t think there is really any wiggle room for frame size, especially now. I did replace the video with one that is 450kb/s and the audio was 48kb/s mono and I think it’s much better, but the file is 50MB. Is it supposed to be that big? Are there other ways to cut down the file size? The flash media encoder doesn’t really have much for options and parameters.

[Chad Gilmour]

If you have adobe flash installed it adds the flv codec into your system and gives you the ability to export directly to flv from you FCP timeline through compressor.

[Chad Gilmour]

Good insight guys thanks, I was aware of the parenting option, looking back I probably should have started with that, but unfortunately the idea that I had involving my question didn’t really work out, but I’ll probably be using this info soon enough. Thanks for the help!