[James Roberts]

That actually sounds more like what I thought. I should still see the advantage in a few places, though, since I’m also running Final Cut Studio 2, Shake, and Adobe Production Premium CS4. I also do have a habit a keeping other apps open sometimes, so it ‘s good to know performance may be improved there, too.

I had them shipped to my time and energy sapping day job, and they arrived today. I waited a little while to put them in because they were pretty cold from being in the car for a couple hours (low 30s today). Very easy to install, and a nice feeling now to click on “about this mac” and see the new 16 there.

I appreciate your taking the time to post a couple responses here. You seem to be a bit of a RAM performance guru on these forums, so I feel pretty secure taking your advice. Thanks again!

[James Roberts]

Thanks for the tip, but it’s already on the way. If you haven’t experienced any problems with the modules from OWC, I’ll trust in that for now. Should I notice an across the board performance boost in just about any app as soon as these are in? I’ve never quadrupled the RAM in a system I’ve already been using before.

I’m sure Apple’s prices are inflated for various reasons both obvious and not so obvious, and there’s perhaps a higher spec to what they place in the case for you, but I’m just not on board with paying a 1000% difference.

I used after market memory in my old iMac DV SE 9 years ago and had no trouble (other than the fact that it was still only 256 MB up from 128, hard to believe that was enough at the time), and they seem to offering an acceptable amount of guarantees, so I’m not too worried yet.

[James Roberts]

Okay, that’s better. I went through the tutorial here again, this time while playing along. That cleared up the confusion I had just watching it. This does now seem like a good way to do it, I like the way I can just apply lip sync and eye blinks to the head, then take that and further animate it’s position in the final scene setup.

I wonder if having nested compositions adds more complications into the redering process. I noticed a quick test (about 2 seconds of lip sync at the beginning of a 30 second timline) was billed as using 55% of the RAM. Is this number likely to go a lot higher with a more full project? I’m generally thinking of doing only 60 seconds or so per project file, then editing the resulting clips in Final Cut. I’m working on a new Mac Pro with what I though was ample RAM (4 GB), but after seeing what some other users have it seems boderline. I don’t have any major RAID setup for rendering either. I hope I’m not in for a world of headaches trying to run this on the low end of things.

[James Roberts]

That’s a good constructive point. Don’t try to compare. Good enough, I’ll start looking into expressions
more. I’ve already gotten a basic understanding of parenting, nulls, and puppet pins. All things that aren’t in Flash but I instantly see a use for, so I’m adaptable to new working methods.

The first thing I did when I got a trial of Flash was to bring in a bunch of 300 dpi Photoshop characters and flew them around the screen. That bogged down quickly, and I learned Flash is not ideal for bitmap and learned the vector symbol approach quickly enough. Now I’ve got the latest Flash, with nice new features like bones to utilize, but being able to go back to the Photoshop images with Ae is the first order of business.

If you mean by “code in Flash” the action scripting level, I never really got into any of that. My goal has always been cartoon animations for video, and I’ve only used it to animate on the stage and export to quicktime. Similar goals with Ae, but I know how the results differ in appearance and that’s the look I’ll be going for. The simplest description would be like a more fluid Aqua Teen Huger Force look.

[James Roberts]

The main thing I didn’t follow from the “Mr Face” tutorial was where in the project the composition of the 8 frames was. Was it just being used as a source, or was it at the beginning of the project? I’m used to having a library to draw from in Flash. I didn’t get if he was moving and duplicating frames from within the timeline or pulling them from a separate composition.

I’m sure when I get the feel for it it will be a better approach than what I noticed with opacity, but I’m concerned about not being able to call up the frames by name. If you work with the same 8 he has in the tutorial it’s probably pretty easy, but I tend to use more mouths for greater expression, and 20 or more might make for a confusing mess. Or add a whole step to the process of printing out a cheat sheet each time a new set of mouths is established.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon and feel dopey for even asking, right now I just can’t compare it to what I’m used to in Flash.

[James Roberts]

I had a feeling that wouldn’t be ideal. The problems usually is, I want specific information up front, but it isn’t. I’ve done a fair amount of searching and tutorial perusing, and still haven’t found a clear set of instructions for the exact processes I’m aiming for.

I’ve got no desire to invent a new way to do it, but it takes time to sort through all the info and learn a new process. While I’m doing that, I want to spend some time getting character assets ready to use.
I like the idea of having all the mouths as well as the head they’re used on all brought in as a layered
Photoshop file, but I don’t want to waste time setting up such files if they all needed to be separate. It sounds as if this will work, though.

It’s obvious it’s going to take time to learn the right process. Not because I’m slow to pick up on it, but because the specific info is hard to search out. I know my way around Flash animation, but there are very big differences between the two.

[James Roberts]

This seems similar to the tutorial here I looked at last night, and seems like a good workable approach. There’s one part I’m not getting yet. He shows you the 8 different mouths as being laid out one after another in the timeline, and those frames are referenced each time that mouth is needed, that part I get, but where are those 8 frames located? At the beginning of the clip like a “lead in”, or is it a composition embedded within to use as a source, but not made visible as an element in the final composition?
I may just need to watch it again.

It almost resembles Flash’s setup of having a library of symbols that can be called up for any individual frame that uses one, or left on the timeline until swapped for another.

However the finer points are, at least it looks like there’s a way to do it. For a moment I started to think the only forms of animation AE could do was moving around and distorting the images on the layers at keyframe intervals. I could certainly see a reason for limiting the ability to run through many different frames when it comes to using bitmaps from Photoshop. It must get memory intensive, where having single upper and lower lip layers and just moving them up and down is easier, and I could have expected them to build in that limitation.

I was under the impression that some of the Adult Swim shows where largely animated using Photoshop & After Effects, but never got enough detail to know if their process included other
any other programs to produce. Much of it looks like it’s done this way-the characters animate
like Terry Gilliam cutouts, but lip sync like they’re swapping phonemes to match the soundtrack.
Which boils down to having a mouthless head, and all the different mouths nested in the project
to be flashed onscreen only at the frames they’re used for. If it does that trick I’m set.

Thanks for taking the time. I just got Final Cut Studio, Shake, and CS4 Production Premium all in the space of a couple months, so sometimes I just need to skip to the specific questions. And they’re not always easy to find in a block of manuals a foot high, so I appreciate getting a few tips.

[James Roberts]

Thanks again. That’s pretty much what I was heading towards after a bit more experimenting yesterday. I had been trying to export some symbols out of Flash to create Photoshop versions, but I was very dissapointed in the results. As vectors in Flash, they looked perfect. No matter how outrageously big I made the exported image (600 dpi in the end), it looked terrible in Photoshop. All fine black lines replaced by extremely stairstepped, chunky pixels.

Later on I tried just creating a new Photoshop document at 1920 X 1080 at 72 dpi, and tested drawing directly in it. Much better resolution at this size, but it still seems that I can’t export the clean vectors to look as good as they could in this environment. I’m trying to avoid having to hand trace them all to get them into a proper file size. That’s why I wondered If Flash symbols could be taken straight into AE.

All this won’t matter as much as far as new projects, I’ll start them out correctly and shouldn’t run into this. But I’d like to use
assets I already created, and it seems strange that I need to recreate something that appears perfectly sharp on my screen but retains far too little of it’s sharpness when exported out.

[James Roberts]

Thanks. That tells me I should be able to do what I’m looking to. My question was more about switching from one frame to another, like a set of phenome mouths that could be set to the sound. I’ve done plenty of it in Flash, but at first glance (and even after going through many Lynda.com tutorials-I do try to find the answers myself first) I couldn’t tell If AE’s animation abilities included swapping out elements like Flash swaps out symbols. It appears there’s a few ways to do it at that.

I’ve tried using puppet pins a little and really like the idea of animating movements this way, and I’ll want to try animating a “puppet mouth”, but I’m going to want to go with the format I’m used to for lip
sync a lot.

Sometimes I just need to find out a basic thing like this, but finding any reference to it is dependent on knowing where it’s mentioned. It’s looks like my next question is going to be what image size is best to work with in Photoshop for bringing into After Effects, and the best way to bring Flash symbols into AE.

[James Roberts]

Well, trying to find free 3d models is frustratingly hard. I’ve been following one dead end after another on google. They either lead to incredibly expensive ho-hum designs, or incredibly broken files that don’t work whatsoever. I guess this is a feature I won’t be playing with unless a money volcano erupts nearby.

A couple hundred bills to play around with somebody else’s sterile robot design is not a tempting offer
to me. I couldn’t even get a lousy CG looking office chair to download.

A direct URL to something usable would have been helpful. As it is just searching “free 3d objects” only brings up annoying goose chases. I’d be better off spending my time on 2D that I know how to find.

Oh well, I was just curious to try, but I don’t need the headache.