[Dustin Brown]

Hi Chris. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. If you’re referring to the ability to import actual comps from AFX into Premiere, without the need to render them first, I’m aware of it. But, as a friend of mine once said to me…”Like all things with Adobe products, just because you *can* do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should.”

1)Scrubbing through unrendered AFX comps in Premiere is going to be much slower, especially when you hit frames with things like Lens Blur and Glow and whatnot on them. Ouch.

2)In my experience, Premiere isn’t so good at memory management. You try to throw too much at it, and you’re setting yourself up to get errors come render time. I try to make things as easy on Premiere as possible, so it can’t possibly have anything to complain about when I go to render. I’ve had problems with TGA sequences, still images over 2K, time remapping, etc. It’s all bad juju for Premiere.

3)Frankly, I don’t want to get into any major Adobe-specific habits, e.g. developing crutches on “features” like that. Who knows, the next job I have might have me using Fusion or Shake, or any number of things. If that’s the case, I’ll need to render out of post to get my shots into editorial, and I’ll need to know a good format for doing that.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

Point taken, but if the client wants the camera movement slowed down or sped up a tad, I’d much rather have the option of making that change quickly in post than having to re-render that stuff out of 3D again. Besides, if you slow down your 3D by a factor of four, then speed it up by a factor of 4 in post, the timing should look normal again. The only difference being that you would now have the option of slowing it down at the desired points without suffering frame loss. That said, I haven’t seen the results of frame blending, so depending on what it does I may be inclined to agree with you.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

I’ll do that. Thanks, Mike.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

As far as it being washed out, once you have the video exported, open it in QT Pro, Window > Show Movie Properties. Select the Video Track. Go in the Visual Settings tab. Set your Transparency mode to Straight Alpha in the drop down. Save your file.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

Nevermind, I figured it out. Roving keyframes are my new friend.

– Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

Well, it’s the difference between scrubbing through pre-composited frames in real-time in Premiere (i.e. those that have been rendered out of AFX), or trying to scrub through frames that have to be comped on a frame-by-frame basis and make Premiere communicate as quickly as possible with your AFX project file so it knows how to handle the comp and AFX-specific effects. Look at it this way. If you have a shot in an AFX comp that you can’t watch in real-time in AFX, and you have to do a RAM preview to view properly, then what makes you think you’ll be able to watch it in real-time in Premiere which, as far as I can tell isn’t as robust a program as AFX as far as processing huge amounts of data? Maybe that works OK on some of the newer quad core uber workstations, but certainly not on mine. I tried once and quickly saw that it was folly.

Besides, on more of a philosophical level, I don’t want to get in the habit of a work flow that doesn’t apply to other compositing software. I see it as a potential crutch. If I end up working for a company that uses Fusion instead of AFX, I’d like to already have a good general work flow in place for working between my compositor and my video editor that can be applied across the board.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

Yeah I can do that in AFX7 + Premiere Pro 2 as well. But like all things Adobe makes, you have to bear in mind that just because you CAN do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it 😉

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

For the last two versions of 3ds max, tucked inside the DVD case has been a 5x5x5-inch “Quick Reference Cube” with all of max’s hot keys on it. It takes like five seconds to fold together into a cube shape and one of the flaps has an adhesive. It kind of feels like a consolation prize, or like something you might find in a kid’s cereal box. Some might be bothered by the bulk, and prefer a small booklet or card or something, but I think it’s kinda neat. It sits on my desk at work 🙂

[Dustin Brown]

Haha, is that the nice way of saying RTFM? 😉

Just kidding. It is something I should have been able to find on my own though. Duh moment.

Thanks again, guys.

-Dustin

[Dustin Brown]

Great tips, thanks guys.

-Dustin