[Greg Sage]

Actually, sorry for the confusion, but I’ve been bouncing between over 20 machines lately doing installs, graphic card updates, etc.

Affected machine is 2008 macpro running 10.8.2 at my neighbor’s house.

He says it’s cs6. He can check exact version when he gets home. He also says I’m mistaken about the cuda install, so I must have gotten it mixed up with another machine I’ve worked on recently. Probably one at the school with recent nvidia cards.

Anyway, not having this issue anywhere else. Haven’t tried loading same project onto different machine yet, though.

[Greg Sage]

Man, I’ve got everything else worked out in the vid but this, and it’s driving me nuts. It’s in most (but not all) of the scenes with a virtual camera.

I’ll load it up and see if I can find any hidden (shy) layers.

If I “mute” everything except the camera and the comp it’s viewing, it’s still there.

If I “mute” the camera, it’s gone, but I can’t see the scene because it’s at the wrong angle.

If I “mute” the scene comp, it’s gone, but so is the scene.

If I open up the scene comp the scene is there, but the rectangle is not.

I have gone through and made sure there are no elements within the scene comp at the same z value competing.

I’m assuming it must be the camera, but does that sound like it could be something else? I actually just ignored it at first because it seemed more like a guide of some sort… until I saw it in the final render.

edited to add: Most of the vid was made from scratch, but the scenes with the rectangle are from a template I purchased, so discovering anything has meant some digging through the hundreds of comps.

[Greg Sage]

Well, I’ve got some incredibly fast motion, and no blur whatsoever, so something’s wrong.

I can try the settings bit. I’ve already got that script for other purposes, so that makes it easy. I get the impression I’m missing something else, though, because I have a few spots where things cross the entire screen in a few frames, and no noticeable blur.

[Greg Sage]

Well, the motion blur bit is really confusing me right now because it doesn’t appear to be doing anything whatsoever enabled or otherwise.

No, though, that doesn’t make it go away.

Track mattes? Hundreds.

Lights? A few.

[Greg Sage]

As near as I can tell, I’ve got that covered. There are thousands of layers total throughout the vid, and I began by trying to enable for each, but then read about the nested comps inherit switches or whatever setting in General prefs, and made sure the “parent” comps were all turned on.

Still, though… kinda choppy. I’m not really seeing an improvement with the motion blur on.

[Greg Sage]

I agree to a point, but since it’s my player on my site, and YT’s player everywhere else, that’s narrowed down quite a bit. I’m only concerned about how it looks in those two instances… browser weirdness and such being what it is.

[Greg Sage]

This is my first time attempting to use motion blur, so not sure if there’s a better way to do this.

I have probably over a hundred layers throughout the main comp with it enabled.

I just tried rendering a single frame and disabled motion blur on the render, and the rectangle is still there.

Is that enough to test for motion blur, or would I have to go find each place it’s on and switch it off?

[Greg Sage]

OK. Noted.

VLC across the board then, or something else?

Ultimately, of course, it’s not my viewing that matters, though… so as I output a compressed 8 bit video for Youtube and my site’s HTML5 player… should I be doing something in particular? Embedding a profile or something like that?

[Greg Sage]

Hmmmm… hadn’t thought of that. I assumed a QuickTime movie would look “as it should” in QuickTime Pro. It doesn’t. The colors are washed out, and the crushed blacks are gone.

It looks like it does in AE when I play in on VLC, though. Does it need a profile embedded?

1 What does that tell me?

2 What do I need to do to ensure it looks as I intend for the greatest number of users once I run it through Media Encoder for Youtube consumptioon and play on my own site?

edited to add: Oddly, though, the audio is blown out in VLC. At around 1/3, it’s full volume. Beyond that, it’s adding gain and distorting. I don’t use VLC much, so not sure if that’s typical. I didn’t have this issue before when I rendered out to QT, compressed in ME, and out to YT.

[Greg Sage]

Hmmm… interesting.

Sounds like exactly what I need.