Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Brian Lynn] “Basically my question is this: how much/will I see a performance increase by moving to a more high end video card? Something FireGL maybe?”
In AE… not much. I would say it’s definitely not worth the price tag. Your previews might be faster, but I find that they are generally less accurate using OpenGL. You won’t use OpenGL at all for final renders.
It might improve your 3D app’s performance though… I couldn’t say.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Steve Roberts] “I thought the QT MPEG2 plug just allowed you to view MPEG2. Hm.”
I believe you are correct sir, although I am able to transcode MPEG-2 files straight out of QT Player. I have QT Pro and Final Cut Studio though, which may install some extra whizzy stuff.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Here are a few pointers:
Time based effects such as ‘echo’ increase render time dramatically.
Some video codecs use interframe compression in which the current frame may not be a full frame (I Frame) but actually an intermediary frame (P or B Frame) that holds information about what has changed since the last full frame. Basically what this means is that, although the file size of the compressed video is smaller, AE has to take lots more time to render the intermediary frames. The major family of codecs that use this scheme are MPEG and its derivatives MPEG-2, H.264, AVC, HDV, etc. Instead of using MPEG footage in your AE project, consider transcoding to a high-quality, intraframe compressed codec such as Photo JPEG at Max quality.
If there are animations/effects going on in your pre-comps then these will obviously add to render time. You should consider pre-rendering your pre-comps (Composition>Pre-Render) once they are finalized. Note that this will not work properly if the pre-comp has its “Collapse Transformations” switch on in the final comp.
Shadows increase render time significantly, do you need lights? Is there a way to fake it that will look just as good? You can also consider decreasing the Shadow Map size in Composition Settings>Advanced>Options>Shadow Map Resolution.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Select the vertex on the path you want to be first, right click it and select Mask>Set First Vertex.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Jake74] “I usually have no problem importing .mov files.”
.mov is a container format. Like .avi it does not define a codec, but contains the video information in an encoded form (any codec supported by QT can work in an .mov) as well as other metadata.
You should try transcoding your video to something with only intraframe compression (I frames) like Photo JPEG at max quality.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
If you hold down the shift key while dragging most items will snap to other items… Layers will snap to other layers, keyframes will snap to keyframes on other layers, anything will snap to the playhead, anything will snap to the in or out point of the composition.
It takes a little time to get used to the Shift key functionality, but it works pretty well.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[SSGGMM] “What plug-in, if any, should I be looking into?”
You should probably look at articles about Removing 3:2 Pulldown. Try this: in the Interpret Footage dialog tell AE to ‘Guess’ at Removing 3:2 Pulldown. This will bring your footage to 23.98 FPS, if your footage was shot the way I think it was then each of those frames should consist of 2 fields belonging to the same frame after this process.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Brian Lynn] “AE will work with HDV footage natively…”
I think this is a bad idea. HDV is based on MPEG-2 which uses interframe compression, meaning that the current frame is built from information in the previous and following frames… This causes extremely slow render times.
You should go to a more production friendly format after/during capture. I like Photo JPEG at maximum quality, and I think Steve will agree with me there (;
Now, on to the problem at hand: If you shot in HDV then your footage should natively be 1440×1080. I have no idea exactly why FC Pro would say it’s 1280×1080, but it probably has something to do with the way you’re interpreting it in FC or an error in your conversion to DVCProHD. Since HDV captures at 1440×1080 you need to apply a 1.33 PAR in the footage interpretation (cmd-f) in AE to bring the 1440×1080 footage up to 1920×1080.
Read more about HDV and how much you should hate it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV#Resolution_and_aspect_ratio
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Carlos] “I wonder however, what will happen if I play this file in a regular 4:3 TV. Will the picture “shrink” to display the black stripes, thus keeping the 16:9 aspect or will it look distorted? Thanks for your answer.”
Yes, this is why you need to tell the MainConcept MPEG-2 Codec that it’s 16:9, there are flags in the M2V that tell a DVD player how to present the footage. DVD players are amazing little machines in that they handle aspect ratio correction and 3:2 pulldown on the fly all by their lonesomes (as long as you have the right flags set in the M2V and the VTS).
Which brings me to my other point, you need to make sure that your settings are correct in your DVD authoring program as well. I’m not as familiar with these, and they vary from program to program, but you should double check your settings.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Are you exporting “with QuickTime Conversion” or just “Export QuickTime”?
You almost never want to use QuickTime Conversion…
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA