[Crea3552]

Great Darby, thanks. Not sure how I missed this?!?

Since all my layers had the position keyframes tumbled down to begin with when I first hit the “p” key it simply closed the position track without adjusting the view to display the layer in the time line. I guess I got fooled at that point.

thanks again.

[Crea3552]

Thanks for responding Darby,

I picked up some good techniques here. Perhaps others would contribute to the mix by comment on their process?

Thanks again.

[Crea3552]

Darby,

thanks for the great ideas. i am going to try out your working method in the morning. I am am sure some of these ideas will help my process.

one question about moving just the keyframes though. I know they will move easily but is there anyway to get feedback about the framing of the shot you are manipulating given that your camera is parked at a different point in time?

thanks again

a

[Crea3552]

The orbit/track tools kinda work – they get you closer by setting up the basic keyframes and then you can go back in and tweak the motion paths within the orthogonal views.

I guess I am looking for a way to stream line this process even further by doing most of this work directly in the orthogonal views.

to see what I mean create a comp with a 3D solid and camera. Now set up a series of keyframes animating the camera’s position and point of interest – but stick to the top and elevational views. Notice how quick and easy it is to set up the camera at each keyframe. This is because you can grab the camera and drag it through 2 dimensions simultaneously, placing it anywhere in the comp you want in one go. Working with the camera’s position and poi properties diagramatically in this way is efficient and gives a good overview of what the animation will behave like once you set up a series of keyframes.

Now zoom the comp out quite a bit and the camera no longer provides this functionality. The resolution for the camera icon has shrunk so now you are forced to move one axis at a time which then requires you to do alot of nudging about to get the camera angles right. When you have complex scenes this can become laborious.

So the question remains what is the best technique people are using to animate the camera? This same issue applies to null objects aswell once you are zoomed out in any orthogonal view.

[Crea3552]

I am interested in seeing this tutorial too. i clicked on the sticky post at the top of the forum and went to the archive but couldn’t find it by wading through the considerable entries there. What is a good search term to find this tutorial about animating illustrator files in this contemporary style?

thanks

[Crea3552]

Gents, thanks for sharing your experience. I believe I have indeed ground up against the disk/Front-Side-Bus/PCI-Bus/Graphics card side bottle neck Bob mentioned. Rats! I am not technically oriented so I am not totally clear where the limitation is through this pipeline – but I have run enough compression tests to see the single node idea is not working.

I don’t suppose there is a cheaper Synched DVD solution out there?

Thanks for additional thoughts

Auguste
auguste@raffael.com

[Crea3552]

Bob, thanks for the feedback!

This is not comforting news though. I tried more tests by rendering the additional codecs mentioned earlier with out much luck. I was however able to get 4 HD movies (H.264) to play back pretty well on the seperate monitors. Have you heard of Apple’s Quartz Composer technology new in Tiger? I am told you can program multiple displays using it. I was hoping I could synch the movies using QC instead of flash which would allow the use of H.264. Any thoughts?

I am also looking into Watchout

[Crea3552]

Hi Steve,

thanks for the reply. Actually let me explain more clearly.

I am working on a High Def project for a Restaurant. The idea is to play a series of 7680 * 1080 movies across four HD monitors arranged horizontally to give the appearance of one large panoramic display. The four displays are driven by one Mac Pro Tower and two Gforce 7300 video cards over single DVI cables.

I have created the movies in After Effects using various codecs but I am having playback issues playing these single large movies across all four screens. I am now thinking about dividing the original movies into four 1920*1080 movies and synching them on playback so they play as one movie. Is there a way to do this?

An Apple tech I spoke with said the single movie playback problem is not hardware, but software. He said the Mac Pro hardware can support throughput of 150 mbps. But the QT software codecs can not decode a movie of this size fast enough. The animation codec plays back jerky. The H264 doesn’t support a frame size of 7680 * 1080. Sorenson 3 shows artifacting in the final product.

Can someone suggest the best way to handle this in Quicktime? Is there an alternative codec to try?

Otherwise, is there a better technology? What is Apple’s Quartz Composer technology? Is this a way to sync four movies to play as one?

In the mean time I will try converting movies to H264 in QT Pro as well as using Photo-JPEG in AE.

Thanks.

AE 6.5
comp: 7680 * 1080; 24 fps
OSX 10.4.37
2×2.66 GHZ Xeon Dual-Core
3 PCI Gforce 7300 video cards
Ram: 2 GB 6.67 Mhz