[Jan Sherlink]

depends on what work you’ll do,

using lots of video and cooool plugins, lensflares, particles, deforming and all that stuff…
… extra CPU’s would be better.

using nice 2.5D with lots of shapes and stroke with cool pans around funny text animations…
… your Quadro will really help you here, not for rendering, more for creating and previewing.

please use the search function, there are a lot of questions and answers like these in the archives !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

“Countless reasons” tends to be synonym for “because we’re used to it”
Not to offend anyone, but there are “countles reasons” to use a container too. They both have their pro’s and con’s.
When to use them, might be a better question

some reasons;

Multiprocessing benefits from Image sequences, each core can easily access an Image frame for reading and they can write their own rendered Image. With containers, only one core can write to the file so that core needs to gather all the images (slower).

Moving around a few 100.000’s images over network and Harddrives, gets really slow, AVI or QT copies at a higher speed

If there’s something wrong in an Image Sequence, only render the wrong Images, in a Container you’ll need to rerender the complete clip.

If your going from AE to FCP and you have something like BlackMagic or AJA, render in their uncompressed codec, no sequences needed here.

If you have an AVI or QT, just doubleclick and it’ll play, even with audio 😉

Image sequences don’t need codecs so everybody can open them…
ok that was an old one 😉 everybody can open Quicktime”none” and AVI”uncompressed”, it’s installed in every OS.

Blackmagic’s framelink looks like the best of both worlds !

So,
use what you want, every job needs it’s own approach, just stay away from those interframe compressions.

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

highest quality and fastest rendertime;
quicktime uncompressed or animation @100% or “none”

these would be the best codecs !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

Rendertime depends on the used codec,
BM MJpeg codec uses more processing power then BM uncompressed although, not much.
On the other hand, uncompressed stresses your system more;
Memory and HardDisk throughput are key here.
My rendertimes stay the same unless I enable the videopreview while rendering, but I’m talking about 10 seconds on a 10 minute render !

Videopreview when Ram-previewing in HD is more tricky,
getting 25fps 1080p doesn’t always work.

this is on XP64

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

There are no optimal settings for Ram usage,
it all depends on what you want; longer previews, more cache …
Working in 2.5D actually benefits from Open-GL a lot !
In you case, working with HD, you would need more Ram…
so start saving 😉
and more Ram requires XP64 or Vista64.
XP32 cuts out 750MB Ram and uses some remaining memory for hardware-mapping.

not the answer you wanted heh 🙁

some solutions;
– buy Nucleo Pro (uses memory far more efficient than Multi-Proc in AE)
– buy extra Ram + XP64
– buy XP64 (will give you the full 4GB)
– Overclock you CPU + good CPU-cooler

About overclocking; normally I don’t tend to advise people to overclock, but the Q6600 is a case apart.
A Q6600 is easily overclocked to 3GHz without voltage adjustments and a good 30$ CPU-cooler. I’ve got 2 machines running at 3GHz and even Renderking does it 🙂

Mac or PC doesn’t change a thing, buying a good machine just requires good money !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

Create a null where your POI should be,
make your null and POI the same coördinates,
parent the camera to the null,
and rotate the null to have a nice circular motion around an object.

hope that helps

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

that would be the best way to work.
You can add an output module that rescales your 1024comp to 720anamorph.

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

I can’t imagine that you can track the dog’s tail,
so you’ll need to keyframe it by hand !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

that shouldn’t have anything to do with XP64
and since you have enough ram to feed 2 processors, it should work…

if you open the taskmanager (CTRL+ALT+DEL) does it show 2 processors ?

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

under the file menu you have; reduce project, consolidate …
check the helpfile for what they exactly do.
then, select your master-comps in AE and do a “collect files – selected comps”
this will make a copy of your project with the needed files.

temporarily rename your original project/assets folder so AE can’t link to the original files.
now check your new project, doublecheck, triplecheck and quadriplecheck,
after that, you can delete the original folder

cya,

EDIT:
use F10, F11, F12 to switch between cameras,
under the view-menu, you can change the shortcut/camera

Jan