[Chris Zwar]

Check your composition settings to make sure the camera shutter isn’t higher than 180. While you can set the shutter up to 720 degrees this possibly causes crashes on memory intensive scenes. If you have depth-of-field on then try turning it off, maybe it’s a combination of the two causing issues.
If you can render with motion blur at half-resolution then you may simply need more memory, and Kevin’s cache solution above may work for you at the expense of render speed.

Hope this helps,

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

You have just described card-dance, no expressions needed 😉

It is the most obvious way of reproducing the effect, but as the pins will be 2D (you could use CC ball-action to generate the source image for you) you won’t get the same feel as a true 3D app with 3D pins.

You could possibly try something with particle playground, using a greyscale control as an ephemeral map, but it would have work on scale rather than true Z-space, so card-dance is more suited to what you want.

I think that Ayato’s website shows some of the stuff you can do with card-dance, but he was using text rather than pins.

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

If you’re looking for help with a particular plug-in then your first stop should be all of the tuorials available here for free- just click on the AE logo at the top of your screen. And you can always search the forums too.

Jim Tierney wrote a great tutorial on using caustics:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/tierney_jim/caustics/index.html

Hope this helps,

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

Don’t forget CC Kaleida! It’s the perfect companion to fractal noise and colourama….

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

Just to add some background to Floh’s wisdom, because I’m procrastinating:

When Media 100 first came out the far majority of people were working with analogue video, and even if they were working with digital video it was digitised through analogue connections (ie. component). The Media 100 cards were essentially analogue to digital converters, and the Media 100 system did it better than any of their competitors at the time.

Because Media 100 was converting the analogue video into a digital file, and the Media 100 was also converting that digital file back into analogue video, there was no compelling reason for Media 100 to follow anyone elses digital standards-eg D1 rectangular pixels. In fact as all computers work and display square pixels it made a lot of sense for Media 100 to digitise video as square pixels, so working with After Effects and Photoshop was much easier. As the ratio of a standard 4×3 TV is 1:1.333, and PAL has 576 vertical lines, you can see that 1.333 x 576 = 768 square pixels. That’s where the number comes from.

But as digital video technology became more accessible through DV, and digital betacam continued to become more widespread, Media 100 was upgraded to accept both SDI and DV digital video directly. Because there was no analogue to digital conversion, digitsing SDI and DV was just a matter of shuffling data around, and so the Media 100 system was adapted to work to the broadcast industry’s digital standard of 720 rectangular pixels. If you are digitising SDI or DV you have no choice but to capture at 720 pixels, 768 is simply not an option.

The squashing you refer to when working with widescreen footage is again normal and the industry standard. All widescreen video (standard def) still has 720 horizontal pixels, they’re just stretched out more than the ones in a 4×3 image. If you want to produce widescreen material with square pixels you need 1024 of them, not 768, and even then you have to squash those 1024 pixels down to 720 before you can output them via Media 100 because – just to repeat it – the industry standard for digital video has 720 horizontal pixels, for both PAl and NTSC, and 4×3 and 16×9 video.

So to sum up – 768 pixels is a legacy from the old days of working with analogue video. If you are working in a purely digital environment you can’t even select 768 pixels as a digitise option. The number of horizontal pixels – 720 or 768 – has no relevance to 4×3 or 16×9, as either way they have to be stretched and squeezed as you describe in After Effects. If you are working with analogue video then it’s best to use 720 pixels as you can then mix and match your footage with other digital sources if you need to.

Anyway I hope this historical background helps you understand where 768 fits in. i have to get back to work…

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

Unfortunately this is a common problem, with no known solution. The only pattern I can see is that (so far) I’ve only heard of it effecting G5s and not G4s… but this is probably because G4s are probably not as popular.

But I reset all my presets to use MJPEG 100% instead of PJPEG 100%, because at 100% they should be the same. If you were in the habit of using PJPEG at qualities lower than 100% then you may need to use higher quality settings that you did with PJPEG to get the same quality.

It’s a real pain.

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

I haven’t tried this so I’m just thinking out loud…

Does your keyboard layout effect whether AE expects “posterize” or “posterise”?

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

I haven’t tried this so I’m just thinking out loud…

Does your keyboard layout effect whether AE expects “posterize” or “posterise”?

-Chris

Motion Graphics Designer
Will animate for food

[Chris Zwar]

Try adding an adjustment layer to your comp, apply the Offset effect, keyframe the Y-value then use “easy ease”.

-Chris

[Chris Zwar]

Try adding an adjustment layer to your comp, apply the Offset effect, keyframe the Y-value then use “easy ease”.

-Chris