[David Johnson]

Personally, I never work with compressed video in AE and consider all of H263, H264, MP4, MP2, MP1, FLV, etc. to be output codecs. Now that I understand the issue your having clearly, I would say that using web-compressed video as your sources is what is causing the issues (see Dave LaRonde’s “Stock Answer #1”, which is available in many posts here and has a more detailed explanation as to why).

I typically work with QucikTime movies in AE … either with any of the Uncompressed codecs or DV, although there are plenty of other suitable codecs for source material (AVI, etc.).

[David Johnson]

The folks at DigiEffects have been releasing new products and running a lot of specials lately … just got an email yesterday.

[David Johnson]

I took survey 1, but the survey 2 link wouldn’t work for me. Might just be my browser or something though.

BTW, seems you Adobe guys ought to be able to post such requests with bold headings like other announcements … the purpose of a survey is to better align products with user needs, which is beneficlal to all users whether we take the survey or not … that seems to qualify as an announcement directly related to the core purpose of the forum (to distinguish from advertising ). Perhaps the COW folk would rationalize similarly?

[David Johnson]

Especially since it doesn’t happen the first couple of times you move the text, it looks like the “maja-media.co.uk” text layer is not actually moving … rather, that the comp window is just adjusting to the left when the other text is moved beyond the viewable area of the comp window, which can give the appearance that the “maja-media.co.uk” text is moving.

Try setting your comp viewer to a size that will allow you to move the text to where you want it without pulling it out of the viewable area. To confirm whether it is actually moving, you might also set a temporary position keyframe for the “maja-media.co.uk” text layer, lock it, move the other text, then check whetehr there is any change in the “maja-media.co.uk” layer position.

[David Johnson]

How did you create the text layers? With a preset? If so, there is probably an expression that is part of the preset that is causing that to happen … check the layers in the timeline for expressions and/or keyframes. Since you are somewhat new to AE and may be unfamiliar with editing expressions, your best option will probably be to recreate the text layers without using the preset/expression.

Or, if that will mean losing some aspect of the text that you want to retain, you might be able to duplicate the layers and mask out the portions you don’t want to see on each duplicate … in other words, the pieces of text would still move relative to each other due to the expression, but you won’t see the parts that are masked.

[David Johnson]

It’s not really an AE issue … the issue is that audio files are often generated with time calculations other than timecode, which is what video software like AE reads.

You might try bringing your audio files into audio software, looking at the actual lengths and using that audio software to trim them to the desired timecode lengths … most audio software has an option for timecode, but it is typically not the default in audio software.

By the way, AE doesn’t really have issues with audio in general … it sometimes doesn’t play nicely with mp3 audio since it is really intended to work with raw media.

[David Johnson]

I’m not an IT guy so I won’t get into system specs, but based on your core question, that is beside the point anyway. Simply put, renders take significantly different amounts of time becuase they’re rendering different things. The length of a comp is in fact one of the factors that determines total render time, but it is only one of many factors … and sometimes even one of the least significant.

It’s important understand what rendering is doing … it is creating entirely new images for every frame of a composition so the amount of time it takes is very dependent upon what each frame consists of.

In other words, if a 15 minute comp is comprised of only 360×240 raw video with only a couple text layers added in AE, it could conceivably render in a few seconds, but if a 15 second comp is comprised of 1080p raw video with numerous complex 3D layers, lights, masks, motion blur, effects/transitions, time-remapping, and/or keyed images, it could conceivably take many, many hours to render.

Similarly, two comps could have all of the same exact things listed above applied with the same exact settings, but if the images they are applied to are significantly different, the two comps could take drastically different amounts of time to render.

You might want to take a look at the “improving performance” section of the AE help for some tips to speed renders like reading from and writing to different drives and making sure those drives are of adequate I/O speed for your needs.

[David Johnson]

You might want to read up on the differnces between raster and vector images and which software works with which.

[David Johnson]

If you have acces to video editing software, you might want to cut up the movies there before importing only what you need into AE.

A useful feature for working with large video files is using low-rez proxy files to work with then replacing them before final render. Info on proxies is here:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSB356ACD2-AF59-4604-B378-31D687DB5ACCa.html

Some other useful AE features you may want to look into are: region of interest, draft quality, adjustment layers, precomposing, etc.

Finally, if you need to do any more with the audio than basic editing, you may want to consider doing that in audio software.

[David Johnson]

I’m not even sure I understand the questions/situation, but since no one else has answered yet, I’ll try …

It sounds like your friend wants to do the edit himself in iMovie instead of just letting you do everything. I don’t use iMovie, but I’d be very surprised if any consumer software had EDL capabilities. Since post work is usually far more time consuming than the edit alone, perhaps the easiest thing would be to have him do a rough edit and send you a copy of it when he sends the raw footage. That way, you’re not wasting time on a bunch of shots that won’t be used in the final and you have a guide to do the final edit by. It sounds like you’re more of an editor than your friend anyway so it’ll probably benefit him for you to clean up his edit as you do the final … he still gets to make the edit decisions, but with the benefits of your skills and without the long commutes.

I hope that helps some.