[Jeff Kay]

Lossless should be what you want. Those are all template. You have to click on the yellow text to open the menu for the Output Module options I described.

This should be the same in CS4. It has been a while, but I learned on CS3 then jumped to 5.5 then 6 and I haven’t seen a change in this process.

[Jeff Kay]

I don’t think there is a difference, but for clarification I’m on CS6 not CS4.

Output Module: Select AVI from the drop down menu. Click format options which will bring up a new window. On that window there will be the video tab and under the video codec drop down menu you should have the option of “none”. These should be the settings for the “lossless” preset for Output Module (though it defaults to not exporting audio).

[Jeff Kay]

I’m not sure how much movement you put when you tried to make it organic. I’d try to put in just enough that I can notice it, but not any other viewer; it sounds silly, but its something they do notice, they just aren’t aware they notice. Only a few pixels worth of movement, nothing sudden. I’d try a wiggle that has very low movement with long frequency between movements, there is only so much you can do if the director doesn’t like it and it might not be worth investing any more time.

[Jeff Kay]

It will actually decrease render time. The raw export is what AE natively uses and (if my understanding is correct) AE will have to calculate this as an intermediary then encode from that to actual exported format. But even if that is not the case, I have tested this many times and can safely say that a raw export is far faster than an export in any other codec, particularly the more compressed lossy codecs such as H.264. Raw export and reencode together might not save time over an AE export of the final codec, but the RAW render time will be less and I’m not impressed with AE’s built in encoder.

[Jeff Kay]

My first thought is also to cut up the flowers into layers. Though if you have already masked the way you want, you can use masks (with no work done cutting into layers should be faster, but if the masks are already set, you should just be able to work with those). You can keyframe mask opacity, so time those keyframes as you want the flowers to appear.

[Jeff Kay]

If you want the animation to play at the same speed and have the end of the animation last longer, then you can also just increase the duration of that composition (the duration of the comp that is the layer you are trying to stretch).

If you want the animation to take longer (e.g. originally it was 15 sec and you need it to take 30 sec), then the fastest dirty way to do this is to stretch. In the timeline window next to the layer you should have the in/out/duration/stretch pane (might be hidden depending on how you have your view setup, turned on by the little buttons in the bottom left of the timeline window). Click on stretch for the layer you want to change and you can adjust by a % factor or a final duration. Note: this changes the timing of the composition and any animations within, also stretch does not handle footage well, though it does seem to handle still images and any AE created effects. If stretch isn’t sufficient, then you’ll have to increase the duration of the animation comp and drag keyframes.

[Jeff Kay]

What format is the Audio? Is it 48K or 44.1k? That difference can cause drift. Is the playback out of sync with the audio waveform? If you start your preview further into the timeline does the audio start at the correct spot (is it drifting only on playback or drifting on the timeline itself)?

If the audio format is not standard and that is what is causing the issue, then transcoding the audio should fix it. Also AE is not the best software to handle audio, so have you considered doing just a video export from AE and laying in the audio in another software?

[Jeff Kay]

You computer specs seem awfully low to me running AE unfortunately. Especially with only 2GB of ram as AE is particularly RAM intensive. Are you able to successfully do full quality RAM previews?

I also recommend not exporting from AE in H.264. The render queue from AE doesn’t handle most of the lossy codecs as well as other encoders (Media Coder, Compressor, Sorenson). If you can handle a large intermediary file, my preferred method of AE export is to export in RAW. This is the same format that AE uses for its previews and will have to calculate it during the export process anyway (and with lower amounts of RAM I could see AE running short on available RAM during the export which could cause corruption, though that is speculation). For a 3min movie I would expect the intermediary size to not be more than 40GB.

So try this. Export from AE Render Setting: Best Setting and Output Module: Lossless, both of those should be presets (or they are in CS6). If not make sure Render Settings are Best and Full and Output Module is AVI with “none” selected as your video codec (also make sure it exports audio if you want the output from AE to have audio). This render should take significantly less time, though its still likely to be a long render. Once you have that intermediary run it through another encoder to get H.264 or whatever format you need for delivery/further use.

[Jeff Kay]

What format did you use to render the final output?

[Jeff Kay]

You can easily copy the .avb bins from your “Avid Template” project into any project you create.