[Eric Bowman]

Yeah. I don’t get it. I love after effects and I appreciate the new updates via Creative Cloud, but the excuses I kept hearing were making me skeptical. I’m not sure if my “solution” would work on Windows as well, but it’s pretty darn easy to simply change out the PNG icons. I only wish I would have thought of this method after a month or so. I suffered with those ridiculous blue keyframes for a year or more before I figured it out.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Found the command to enable AVI for you.

1) Make sure you have QuickTime 7 installed, this will not work with the new Quicktime Player. As long as you have that installed, and you DO NOT see the option on export to select AVI proceed.

2) Open Terminal, copy and paste this command, then hit enter: qtdefaults write LegacyVideoCodecs AppleCinepak enabled

3) You’ll see a message stating that Apple Cinepak has been enabled. Relaunch QT 7 and you can now export to a Cinepak codec AVI file.

Good luck! I realize that a lot of the “scoreboard” guys can get along fine with MOV files, but some are stuck in their ways. I feel it’s often easier to just give them what they want rather than explain how the MOV is perfectly fine. Hope this helps.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

You indeed CAN export AVI’s on a Mac using Quicktime Player 7 and the proper codecs. You just need the QT component. Last month I ran out 6 or 7 AVI’s for the Cardinals. Running this on Yosemite btw.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

I know this is fairly old now, but I thought I’d leave this here in the event someone has the same problem. I recently used RSMB for a 3D animation and had a heck of a time getting overlapping 3D objects to play nicely. Basically if one area of the 3D mesh were moving in front of another mesh, it would not be blurred. The correct fix would be to have a render pass for the foreground element and another for the background. This would have required many hours of re-rendering however, and I didn’t have the time.

So, I then found the following two links:

https://motionworks.net/c4d_reelsmart-motion-blur/
https://vimeo.com/33243611

The gist is:

1) BEFORE you render your beauty/RGBA pass, add a multipass item in Render Settings for the motion vector pass. This will save a separate render pass just for the motion vectors.
2) Per RE:Vision Effects page, you SHOULD be using an alpha. Anything transparent will not be calculated resulting in a much better blur.
3) To get rid of the sharp edges when you apply RSMB Vectors plugin to your RGBA pass, precompose the motion vector pass and the RGBA pass together. Place the RGBA on top of the motion vector pass and set the motion vector pass to use the RGBA pass as an alpha matte.
4) Use simple choker on the RGBA layer that is above the motion pass, and set it to roughly 2-3 pixels. This will choke and soften the alpha a tiny bit, ultimately resulting in a better motion blur.
5) Place that precomp into another comp, slap the original RGBA pass on top. Add the RSMB Vectors plugin to the top RGBA layer and point the plugin to the motion vector precomp. You should notice a much nicer result now.
6) Finally, you might need to go to the motion vector pass in the Project panel, right click > interpret footage > color management and click on the Preserve RGB checkbox.

Another tip:

For my project I didn’t have time to have two passes rendered for my foreground object and background object. I first tried the RSMB basic plugin and it did a pretty good job. The RSMB Vectors plugin was much more accurate after some tweaking, but I still had an issue with the 3D object overlapping and where they did overlap I had no blur. It looked bad. So, I added the RSMB Vector plugin first, then right below it I added the basic RSMB plugin with a very low setting of .25 for the amount. By adding the RSMB plugin under the RSMB Vector plugin, it blurred everything a little further and allowed the overlapping areas to blur.

Thanks for reading my book. 😉 I hope it helps someone.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

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[Eric Bowman]

Thanks so much for this.

I searched on Dan’s site for a while and never found this specific article. Sorry to be a bother, and again thanks so much for the link!

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Haha. You’re a busy dude Todd. I think I posted here before I read your reply on Adobe’s forums. I was just hoping to see a fix/tweak here in the meantime. 🙂 No worries. I’m sure you guys will get a solution figured out soon.

Thanks for all you do man!

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Was simply trying to get back to the OP’s original question, and the OP was the one that mentioned the 7619 not you. Benchmarks are not available yet for the new Mac Pro. Just trying to have a friendly conversation regarding the computer he is specifically asking about and how it MIGHT compare.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

I agree with a lot you are stating, and you must have been confused with the current Mac Pro model, and not the upcoming Mac Pro regarding memory.

As far as that 820 you’re talking about, I’ve been looking at that exact model if I do decide to go to Windows again, but it gets pricey quickly. That considered I don’t feel the 6 core 2013 Mac Pro is going to be a bad value. The AMD GPUs will be fine as well, as they are supported in Maya, C4D and even Element 3D. Unless I’m missing something, the only thing we will be missing out on is the new Raytrace 3D renderer in AE, which I personally rarely use; I imagine that’s the case with other professionals too. Granted a choice in the matter would be preferred but it’s not a deal breaker in my opinion.

As far as the original question, I would imagine the benchmarks will be pretty comparable to the Dell Precision workstation 7610 (You said 7619 but I don’t see that) if you compare similar hardware; all the hardware is so similar now between Mac and PC. Just for grins I tried to spec a machine that is as close as possible to the 6core upcoming Mac Pro and the price increases quickly. I spec’ed the following:

Dell Precision T7610
CPU: Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2667 (Six Core, 2.9GHz, 15M, 8.0GT/s, Turbo) E52667
Memory:32GB DDR3 1600Mhz, ECC
Hard Drive:256GB SSD with PCIe Controller
GPU:2 x 4GB nVidia K5000
Total:$7193.50

Now, I know it’s not a perfect comparison. The Dell has 16GB extra RAM on this configuration (not sure what the increase will be on the Mac Pro), more upgrade options internally regarding storage, options on graphics cards, and even a dual socket motherboard if you wanted to go that route. The Dell however is slower regarding the RAM speed (1600Mhz vs. 1866Mhz on Mac Pro), the processor is not configurable to what they will have in the Mac Pro, and from what I gather I believe the SSD storage they are planning on the Mac Pro will be faster.

Personally that’s a big enough difference for me to consider the Mac Pro even if I have to buy an external Thunderbolt RAID. Still not sure which way I’m going to go, but I feel the Mac Pro is looking like a decent value.

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Alex, I agree that the speed of the new Mac Pro is still TBD, but you have your specs wrong. There will be 4, 6, 8 and 12 core models available and the memory limit will be 64GB (not 32). https://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/mac-pro

Specs at the link above.

They are only showing the 4 and 6 core models pricing at the moment.

I’m in the same boat right now, trying to decide between a home built PC, name brand PC or the new Mac Pro. I spend about 80% of my time in AE and I’m even wondering about Xeons vs i7 CPUs. I do 3D work as well so I would imagine I’ll be best served using Xeons with multiple CPUs for rendering but I’m in limbo until I start to see some benchmarks from the new Mac Pro.

Waiting is the hard part. 🙂

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com

[Eric Bowman]

Thanks for the suggestion. I never thought about that. Probably worth messing with that.

I understand what you are saying too, the perimeter is changing so you have to add more dashes. However I was hoping there would be a way to “lock” the number of dashes in so that if the shape is altered/scaled/etc you the shape would just scale and warp. Not adjust the dashes along the path. Hopefully that makes sense.

I don’t know if it’s even possible, but one idea I had was to precomp the shape layer in the “kidney bean” shape I have in the video. Then use the tracked shape from motion as a distortion for the precomp. This would achieve what I’m looking for, but I don’t think AE has this capability right? I know we have Bezier Warp and Mesh warp but that doesn’t allow such fine control.

Feature request Adobe! Warp Mask!!! 🙂

Is there a plugin that does this already and I just don’t know about it?

Eric Bowman
AssemblyCreative.com
EricSBowman.com