Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Heya,
If that’s not a typo and one of your layers really is 7300px on a side, then that’s your problem. Motion does all its processing on the graphics card, and GPUs have a hardware limit on how large a texture they can draw/process. ATI cards (at the moment) are limited to 2048×2048. Nvidia cards can go to 4096×4096. Anything larger than that has to be cropped by the card, but Motion resizes the image to the max size (2K or 4K) for you, to prevent that cropping. Unfortunately, that resizing doesn’t always look so hot. You’ll need to resize your media in PS before bringing it in, most likely.
A more thorough explanation can be found here: https://www.motionsmarts.com/tutorials/nutsandbolts/sizematters.html
Good luck!
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Heya,
Good questions. As far as I can tell, Motion projects that are processed using the Quicktime Component (i.e. bring a Motion project into FCP as a media file) only ever get processed in 8-bit. I think this is probably a limitation of Quicktime, which doesn’t natively support float. To get the benefit of float processing, you’d need to export your projects from Motion (not Compressor) and then use those movies in FCP et al. The renders are 8-bit movies, but the math to get those results will have been done in float.
For the type of work you’re describing, though, I think 8-bit will do the trick. If you ever run into significant banding problems or the like, then you can always try shifting the project into float and see how it looks. Unfortunately, by the time your work gets to a viewer, it’s usually been compressed by broadcasters or cable/satellite operators so much that it doesn’t matter 🙁
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Heya,
I’ve been meaning to write up a tutorial/article that covers this, so now I have a chance to test out my explanation. If it comes across as a bunch of squawking noises, please bear with me 😉
There can be a number of reasons to do your compositing in 16- or 32-bit float. Most of them, though, don’t apply to video work.
First, is film: film work is typically done on 10-bit-log Cineon files that are converted into 16- or 32-bit linear space, or OpenEXR files, which are already 32-bit. The extra headroom (over 8-bit) allows for a greater range of values, which film is capable of. This includes superwhites and blacks (think explosions, sun reflections, etc). Motion allows for the import and export of OpenEXR sequences, so it would be possible to do film-level compositing in Motion, or generate 32-bit elements for compositing in other apps. A little bird told me that ILM used Motion to generate some of the smoke elements for the dragon-fight sequence in the last Harry Potter, for example. If your media starts out as video footage, though, it almost certainly has no information (to start with) that requires 16/32-bit headroom.
There are times, however, when you might perform certain operations in a project using 8-bit media that would benefit from the increased accuracy of float processing. Without getting too far into the compositing math: compositing and image operations require that elements get pre-multiplied and un-premultiplied over and over. Multiplying and dividing, again and again. In 8-bit, RGBA each have 255 levels, and they are always integers (whole numbers). So in the course of those operations, rounding occurs and can lead to errors, like banding. Try this in Motion:
1. Create a new, empty project.
2. Add a Clouds generator to the Canvas.
3. Set the Opacity of the generator to 10%.
4. Duplicate the generator three times (Cmd+D).See the posterization that has occurred? This is an extreme example, brought on by comping low-opacity “soft” images together, but you can see the effects of the rounding errors. Now, take that same project and shift it into 16-bit. You’ll see a much better result. Moving into float space allows for fractional values: black is 0 and white (on your screen) is 1.0. With the extra precision, a lot more accuracy is possible. Float also allows for values greater than 1, those superwhites I mentioned earlier. In 8-bit, all values above 255 (white) are clamped, but float allows for much higher values. Again, though, it depends on your destination medium. If you are shooting back out to film, which holds a much larger range of values than video, having those float values is essential. But since TVs and computer monitors are 8-bit (for now), you typically don’t need to worry about float output.
Another issue is speed and memory footprint. Motion does all its image processing on the GPU, so if you have a 128MB card, it has 128MB of space for processing your 8-bit images. But if you’re working in 32-bit float, which requires four times as much memory space, you now have 32MB (one-fourth of 128) of space on your GPU. Because of the increased overhead, processing in float can be quite slow. If you have an Nvidia GPU, though, 16-bit processing is accelerated, so it’s not nearly as brutal, speedwise, as 32.
The long and short of it: mathematically, things will be more accurate if you do your work in 16- or 32-bit. Your work will also go slower and hit the limits of your GPU sooner. If you’re working on video, it will likely make no difference in your results, but as shown in the above example, it CAN make a difference in very specific situations.
Good luck!
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Heya,
Stardust did a Bombay Sapphire spot that is almost all still-based animation. Their site is something of a Flash maze, but Apple has the spot here: https://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/stardust/video3.html
MK12 has the ‘Back to the Lake’ video, which is pretty much all stills and image-based modeling work: https://media2.mk12.com/v5_qt_html/2005/backtothelake.html
The always-amazing folks at Psyop usually do more fine-art-style animation, but they did a Napster campaign that is mostly still-based: https://www.psyop.tv/napster02
Good luck!
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Heya,
The replicator line-drawing method can be used as a general write-on tool. Basically, take the image/text/whatever that you want to use as a template and use it as the source for an image mask on the replicator. The replicator draws on the “fill” and the mask cleans it up.
An example can be found here: https://homepage.mac.com/specialcase/writeon.html
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Heya,
In addition to online resources, Motion ships with a nice set of tutorials, they’re just in PDF format so a lot of people miss them. In Motion, go to the Help menu and select ‘Tutorials’. There’s a good section on particles.
Good luck!
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Heya,
It’s possible that your ProKit version (the Pro Apps UI library) has gotten mismatched. That’s usually the reason for windows not appearing/drawing.
Try downloading the Pro Application Support update from https://www.apple.com/support/downloads/proapplicationsupport31macosx104.html
It may do the trick. Good luck!
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Heya,
Sometimes simulation behaviors override other animation. You can still achieve your effect by rendering out a small movie of one of your wiggling circles and then replicating that movie. You can tell the replicator to use a random start frame for each point, so you can get a fairly-random wiggle while still maintaining flow. Here’s an example: https://homepage.mac.com/specialcase/bubbles.html
Good luck with your project!
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Heya,
The benefit of having the 4K texture limit on an Nvidia card is much more than having 4K-res projects: large text objects, for example, can very easily break the 2K limit of ATI cards, so being able to process out to 4K can make the difference of being able to complete a project or not.
That being said, it seems to be nigh-impossible to get an aftermarket Nvidia card. I have heard that there are a number of people who are managing to flash PC versions of NVidia 7800/7900s to work in a G5.
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Heya,
Just to clarify Jim’s post: When Motion is installed on a system, Quicktime can read a Motion project as if it were a rendered movie. It also allows AE to import a Motion project as if it were a Quicktime, and you can still make changes to the project in Motion and see them reflected in AE.