[Jeff Davis]

Thanks, Chris, but I don’t want to duplicate the slot machine effect, with the characters sliding in and out of view. I want them to just appear and disappear in place.

[Jeff Davis]

Thanks!

[Jeff Davis]

When I create the new sequence, PP won’t let me unlink the width and height fields on the General tab, so I can’t set them both to 720.

[Jeff Davis]

Hi, Todd. As you may have noticed on the Adobe PP CS5 forum, I’m trying (under another nickname) to track down the source, but without much success. I’m not trying to add to the rumor (of 100 CUDA cores cutoff), just trying to nail down the truth, and I’m happy to defer to you. As for the i7 cores getting a workout in my case, I suspect it’s due to my performing an h.264 encode which I gather leans more on the CPU than the GPU.

[Jeff Davis]

Aah, that’s exactly it. I was misinterpreting “entire work area” as “entire sequence” and avoiding it.

As an aside, the documentation’s a little sketchy on this point, but my impression is that Premiere (via Mercury) only uses (approved) graphics cards for rendering previews, not for exporting/final renders. If that’s true, is there any net gain by rendering previews (accelerated by the graphics card) of the entire project before exporting, and then using those previews during the export, which are supposed to speed things up?

[Jeff Davis]

Thanks loads for that rendering tip, Dave. It never would have occurred to me. Can’t wait to try, but what output format do you recommend rendering to from AE if I want to do my final encoding in Adobe Media Encoder (which I have, unlike Sorenson or Apple’s Compressor)?

Regarding “resize during render,” if I add my comp to the render queue and select “Custom” for the output module, there’s a Resize option on the Main Options tab in the resulting dialog. There it lets you resize height and width to anything you want, as well as standard resolutions and aspect ratios.

Jeff

[Jeff Davis]

Thanks for the explanation, but I’m already rendering to h.264 within After Effects. If I resize during the render to 960 x 720, the fades, pans, and zooms appear as they should during playback.

[Jeff Davis]

During playback of the rendered clip. It’s actually fine during RAM preview. And I should say that pans and zooms display the same jitterines, again during rendered playback only.

[Jeff Davis]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer, Dave. Have you ever seen a table laying out these relationships for various comp sizes?

[Jeff Davis]

Aah, yes. Thanks very much. I was aware of that issue but just haven’t encountered it yet in anything I’ve worked on. Didn’t think about it hard enough, I guess. It seems to me the most intuitive way to work would be to create an image (in Photoshop or Illustrator, e.g.) at the final resolution of the comp, but with square pixels so it doesn’t look distorted. Then interpret the footage in AE to the comp’s pixel aspect ratio. Any cons to that approach?