[Jan Sherlink]

… and Adobe advises 2GB Ram/Core,
that makes 16GB Ram for your system !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

-Uninstall Quicktime
-Uninstall VLC-player !!
-Clean your registry (with something like CCleaner)
-Install Quicktime again

try to open your file in AE again, and post back.
Quicktime PNG files might be too hard to decode in VLC.

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

In Keylight
Set view to Combined matte
Play with the settings “Clip Black” “Clip White” and the “Screen Despot”

If that doesn’t work you should start making mattes,
check the tutorials for procedural mattes and garbage matte,
you’ll find some good techiques there.

No I’m not going to say “use green screen” cause that would not be an answer to your question

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

Are you hitting the Spacebar or the NumPad 0 ?
Sounds like your setting might be just a shortcut !?

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

Adobe suggests 2GB Ram/Core, so you would need 8GB

I’ve done a little testing with CS3 when we got it;
on a quadcore with 8GB Ram + 2TB Raid0.

AE + multiprocessing used 7.5 GB Ram
AE + Nucleo Pro (multiprocessing plug-in) required 4-5 GB Ram

in some cases Nucleo rendered the compositions faster with less memory requirements, not always… but never slower.

but… using 8 GB will require a 64 bit OS (Vista64 or XP64)
There are a lot of incompatibilities when using 64bit,
time for software writers to start writing for X64,
but until then … see what works for you.

If you want to keep working in Vista32 I would suggest you buy Nucleo Pro, it will be better than AE’s multiprocessing but working with HD won’t leave you much headroom !

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

AE doesn’t really have a “distributed multicomputer rendering”, the only thing it has is a poor network render mode.
It allows to setup a network share and let clients render over the network.
The only thing that came close to distributed rendering/previewing is X-factor by Gridiron, but that’s discontinued !

here’s a link: https://www.gridironsoftware.com/pg/News_xfactor_15

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

The four instances are the “MultiProcessing” feature in After Effects.
It’s ok ! if you have plenty of Ram !
4 GB Ram on (guessing) Win XP32 is not much when working with HD.
Are you working in 8-16-32 bit color depth ?
Do you get No Ram Preview at all or just a few frames ?

Try disabling MultiProcessing and let us know if it works.

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

I don’t have CS4 yet,
but have you made sure that in your render settings
the “Quality” option is set to “Current Settings” ?

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

You won’t find specific info on that card, but quite a lot on Open-GL in AE.

Some things;
– for rendering: never ! disable it
– for previewing: ok on some comps but the Multiprocessing won’t work
– for working: great ! especially with a Quadro

I mostly put Open-GL on “interactive”. When working in 3D-space with 50+ objects placed, I’m glad that Open-GL exists. Some of my projects would have been dam’n hard to make without open GL.
When doing compositing, keying, colourgrading,… I just switch of that buggy thing.

cya,

Jan

[Jan Sherlink]

Keep your footage “as is”
Let AE do the deinterlacing. Just make sure you interpret your footage correctly. With interlaced footage, enable the “preserve edges” it’ll render a bit longer but the quality will be outstanding.
Motionwise, your progressive footage will be of lesser quality, so that will be the way to go.
Render your comps without fields so interlaced-sources will become progressive and progressive-sources will stay progressive(sharp).

If you render interlaced, your final product will be a mix of 1080i and 1080p within one frame, not all TV’s/LCD’s can display that correctly. These days most LCD have 1080p motion correcton to make images run more fluidly. With a mixed output you could have some weird artefacts.

so your setup would be:
Source1 Key: separate fields: upper/lower fields with PE selected
Source2 Assets: separate fields: off
Rendering: field render: off

cya,

Jan