Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[Marco] “their 3D layers look affected by the camera while I’m scrubbing for a while, but a certain point they stop to react to the camera.”
It sounds like your camera layer isn’t set to the full duration of the composition. Check that?
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This is something I’ve been dying to find out for a long time. I tried to figure it out myself once, but got stalled at getting the arbitrary map into AE. I’ll give it another shot, but if anyone knows how to do this would they mind sharing?
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Your video card should support full OpenGL previews, but I’ve had bad luck with the OpenGL in AE. Check your fast preview preferences to see what you’re using (it’s at the bottom of the comp window, a small button that looks like a window with a lightning bolt through it). I prefer to use Adaptive Resolution as that works better on my system, but you could play with it to see what works for you.
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QuickTime Player should be able to handle running full screen video as long as the data rate isn’t too high and you’re not using some crazy codec like DivX =\
I’d say that QuickTime Photo JPEG is your best bet for reliably smooth and high quality video playback. You will end up with a fairly large file with this codec but it should be significantly smaller than uncompressed video and run a lot smoother.
Also, if you select your video track in the Movie Properties window (ctrl-J/cmd-J) and go to ‘Other Settings’ you can tell QT Player to preload the track into RAM and cache it for looping… I’m not sure if this is available outside of QT Pro, but you should have QT Pro anyway =) Also, if the file is large this may result in degraded performance as QT may not have enough memory to load the entire file into RAM. I haven’t played with these features very much, so if anyone else knows optimal settings lets hope they chime in =)
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It runs supah-fast on my Mac Pro. The downside is that most of the 3rd party plugs that I’m accustomed to using aren’t universal binaries, so in order to have access to these I have to run CS3 under emulation anyway. I’ve done tests without Rosetta emulation though, and it runs beautifully.
One thing to note is that when you enable multiple core processing in CS3, each instance of CS3 expects to get at least 512MB of RAM. So you need to make sure you have enough RAM to feed the beast on each instance you’re going to run.
If you have your memory prefs in AE CS3 set to use 60% of 2GB of RAM then each instance is going to try to use 1.2GB of RAM and cause problems. If you want CS3 to use 2 cores (you can choose how many instances to create in preferences) you’d want to set it so that each instance gets about 1GB of RAM (maybe a little less to be safe) so set your RAM prefs to use “45%” (in reality each core will use 45% of the total meaning 90% of your total RAM). At least, that’s my understanding of the current multi-core setup with CS3.
Also, the multi-core benefit is only seen with RAM Previews and Renders (which is when it really counts anyway).
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Set the text to center align (instead of left). This should be an option that looks familiar from word processors. It appears in the formatting window when you are using the text tool.
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[stevem1928] “On somethings I can seem to get away with premult. I think it depends on what the feathering looks like on the alpha channel. I can not be for sure on this.”
It depends on how the receiving application handles premultiplied RGB channels.
Premultiplying makes the RGB channels a solid color matte (usually black) where there is no alpha (black), mixes (multiplies) pixels in the RGB channel with the matte color where the alpha is gray, and shows an unmultiplied RGB channel where the alpha is white.
You will often experience a fringe of the solid color if you don’t interpret the alpha correctly. After Effects allows you to un-premultiply this footage on import which essentially removes the matte color from the edges of the footage (removing the fringing).
If Premiere Pro has a similar feature then you can use premultiplied footage and avoid fringing. Most programs have a way to deal with premultiplied footage.
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Where is the video coming from? If it has an alpha channel, is it properly interpreted?
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Something as subjective and far reaching as ‘mood’ is hard to define in terms of specific effects and processes. The three films you mention are a perfect example of this, they are all similar in that they are heavily stylized… and yet they are all unique because the associated art departments decided on a very specific ‘mood’ for each film.
I think one process that you might be interested in is a Bleach Bypass (try searching for this on the Cow), but other than that it really depends on what ‘mood’ you’re looking for.
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[IndieSoon] “Green screen, shot on DV, brought in with Blackmagic 10bit 4:2:2 via Component”
Just curious, is there really a benefit to bringing DV footage in at 10bit 4:2:2?