[Darby Edelen]

[Diego Gonzalez] “But the moment I put the TIFF sequence below the Precomp and select Luma Matte the precomp contents turn to black and white.”

Just checking: if the TIFF is supposed to be the matte it should be above the precomp and the precomp below it should have the Luma Track Matte setting enabled.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If you want the edges of the cameras fields of view to line up then you shouldn’t assume that the standard (“50mm”) focal length is the correct one to use.

Depending on the lengths of the walls you’ll actually need to use different zoom (focal length) values. If all the walls are the same length (square room) then you’ll enter half the compositions width in the zoom value of each camera. This will give each camera a 90 degree horizontal field of view. 90 degrees x 4 cameras = 360 degrees.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Matt Dragovits] “I have a path that I’ve drawn for an arrow to follow and I would like to turn that same path into a graphic. I tried redrawing the path and then applying the “generate” “stroke” on it but it doesn’t seem to do anything.”

It sounds like the path you’re talking about is a motion path (position keyframes). If that’s the case you can select all of those position keyframes, copy them, create a new solid layer the size of your composition, add a mask to this solid and paste those keyframes with the Mask Path property selected. This should give you a Mask Path that precisely follows the motion path. You can then apply the Generate > Stroke effect to that layer.

Alternatively you can create a new shape layer and paste the position keyframes to a Path property (Paths can be added using the twirl down ‘Add’ menu to the right of the layer’s ‘Contents’ group). Add a stroke and a trim paths as well to be able to reveal the stroke. The shape layer’s path will be offset from the original motion path unless you set the shape layer’s position property to [0,0].

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “The 8-core Mac is essentially 16-cores, with hyperthreading. 32GB is the bare minimum for such a system.”

I think AE would be okay-ish with 8GB of RAM just so long as he’s not using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, that’ll eat his machine alive.

With AE + PPro running that might be a different story.

RAM is definitely the easiest and most cost effective investment you can make to improve your workstation.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Mitch Davis] “Now I am thoroughly confused. I feel like there is something on my PC that is bottle-necking the rendering process.”

Hmmmm… I guess you could double check your Render Settings and also let us know what sort of Output Module you’re using.

My first guess was that your PC is running low on RAM and switching to paging files on your system drive. AE can get very slow when it runs low on RAM.

Here are a couple of factors I’d check into for differences on the two machines:

-How much space is available on the system drives on your Mac and your PC?

-Is your Disk Cache on the system drive or another drive?

Other than that I’d recommend reserving at least half of your CPU cores for other applications as a general rule of thumb.

Another thing you might do is look at your Activity Monitor (Mac) and Resource Monitor (PC) while the render is active. See if there is anything unusual like some aeselflink processes not appearing to carry their weight (can be an indication that all processes are not capable of being fed by RAM) or if you have lots of paging file IOs on your disk.

Lastly, a good machine restart can do wonders to fix problems like this 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Jason Jantzen] “cool! the bulge expression works great, but how do I control the size of it? also, I’m still having trouble keeping the bulge center on the layer’s position. keeps moving around with the camera move.”

The expressions are tied to the Bulge Center and Bulge Radius properties, so changing them will change the location and size of the Bulge relative to the layer.

As I said, these expressions do not account for rotation of the layer relative to the camera, they only work correctly when assuming the layer is facing the camera.

These are only stop gap solutions.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Check your composition settings again and make sure that you’re set to use “Square Pixels.” My guess is that you’re not.

Assuming that you’ve been working at another Pixel Aspect Ratio (1.21?) your composition probably looks okay as is in AE and you probably can’t simply switch the composition to Square Pixel now (it will make things look stretched out).

If that’s the case then you’ll need to create a new 556 x 323 composition with Square Pixels, drag your old composition into it, then with your old composition selected go to Layer > Transform > Fit To Comp.

Everything should look good in your new square pixel comp now. Use the square pixel comp to render.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Darby Edelen] “However, you still won’t get proper rotation or scaling of the effect. Those would require separate more complex and more effect dependent expressions to handle.”

Here’s the expression you’d apply to the Bulge’s Horizontal and Vertical Radius properties assuming that you’ve applied it to a continuously rasterized 3D layer:

try{
c = thisComp.activeCamera;
z = c.cameraOption.zoom;
p = toWorld(anchorPoint);
cp = c.toWorld([0,0,0]);
cv = c.toWorldVec([0,0,1]);
dist = p - cp;
value * z / dot(dist, cv);
}
catch(err){
value;
}

This will return the default value (not work) if there is no active camera at the current frame.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Jason Jantzen] “ah, that’s it. i have a bunch of vectors, so yeah, they’re continuously rasterized, and at this moment, there’s no going back to resize them and start over. do you think there’s any way around it?”

With a continuously rasterized layer the effect’s position is in composition space, so you’ll need to use an expression to convert the position value in the effect from layer to composition space. Sounds complicated but there’s an easy expression for this:

toComp(value);

The above applied to the effect’s position property will cause the effect to track its position with the layer’s position.

However, you still won’t get proper rotation or scaling of the effect. Those would require separate more complex and more effect dependent expressions to handle.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If you have a way to matte out the background you could try a camera track on the subject.

The reason this won’t normally work is because the track points in the background will contribute much more to the solve. The subject won’t fit into the solution and its tracker points will not be considered. If you remove the background from the equation then AE will attempt to solve with what it has, which is the foreground subject.

Motion is relative, so whether it’s the camera moving or the ‘world’ (world meaning your subject in this case) moving around the camera there’s the potential to get a usable track.

This still may not work. It’s much less likely to work if the parts of your subject are rotating independently. If, for example, they’re walking toward the camera, and they look to the left, then to the right the camera tracker will see different parallax on the face than the body and this may contribute to errors in the solve.

There’s a lot that could go wrong, but also the potential to be pleasantly surprised at a usable solve 🙂 Worth a try in my opinion.

Darby Edelen