[Jimmy Brunger]

Yeah, I heard x64 is best bet for RAM hungry AE work..you can dedicate all 4GB to AE and then any left over will be used by the multiple instances of AE fired off when Nucleo or CS3 previews/renders.

Why not get XP and x64 on a dual-boot. I’d hazard a guess that keeping your pro apps and eveyrthing else completely separate would be more stable. I think this is what I’m going to do unless Vista64 gets a little better.

Adobe really do need to pull their fingers out and go 64bit ASAP. All the other big compositors out there already have or are doing very shortly.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Jimmy Brunger]

It would…depending on how much you were going to spend on GFX card (anything about mid-range is a bit of a waste in AE) double your RAM and maybe try get more cores if you’re running Nucleo or CS3.

Don’t forget, full res HD is almost 4 times as much information to process than SD!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Also, if you’ve got the 8-core mac then either double your RAM (Nucleo Pro wioll use it all..I presume CS3 will aswell?) or lower the number of cores AE uses to get less bottlenecking. It needs 1-2GB RAM per core to work effectively.

But yeah, a new top-end mac Pro with AE6.5 and no multiprocessing does seem a waste! Good luck. That brewaking down of PSDs sounds like a good plan…AE will only render what chunk is on screen at the time, rather than trying to process the whole layer every frame.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Jimmy Brunger]

I have to say OSX leopard and a mac is starting to look like a much more attractive prospect than trying to botch one of Microsoft’s OS’s to work properly with pro apps and still have drivers for everything else. Especially with OSX running Windows aswell if needs be..

Seems there is no version of Windows that is upto scratch at the mo..take note MS.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Jimmy Brunger]

BTW – does anyone know the situation with selling SGI software? I’ve got a fully boxed copy of Avid Media Illusion and Matador that we can’t use at work anymore as we have no SGI workstations…

I tried to conrtact Avid but got no reply.

Anyone want to give them a home?

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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[Jimmy Brunger]

You can accomplish most roto needs in After Effects with enough time, but if you want really good mattes with variable feathering then AE is not great as you can only soften the whole mask at a time, either in X axis or Y or both.

Combustion has b-splines with variable feathering per point in the mask, or there’s programs like Avid’s now deceased Elastic Reality – which has b-splines which you may be able to pick up cheap these days.

For cheap plugins for AE to make your life easier/give you better results try PF Feather by Re:Vision, or Roto by Silouette FX. Or for really powerful integrated tracking/roto apps that will speed things up considerably look at Imagineer Systems Mocha or Motor. They are quite a bit more money though. They’re the best you can get though. Depends how often you’re going to be doing this…

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[Jimmy Brunger]

So, do we think it’s only an issue if you’re a non-student buying an educational version direct from Adobe’s site then?

I’m getting on Amazon when I get my home setup sorted then! Unless this upgrade thing is a problem…I fear you may be right Retlaw.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Guys,

Yeah Dave – viewing it on my BVM through Premiere.

Moldy – I think I can get it looking ok if I have motion blur on, so that’ll be my fix until I get time to try some other variables. I tried pretty much everything without mobluer on though and it either flickered and stuttered in it’s movement, or moved smoothly but the text itself looked like a field had been removed (like when you deinterlace text)

The bizarre world of rollers eh!

BTW – I was going at about 5 or 6 pixels p/frame depending if I tried it progessive or interlaced.

Last thing then – is this subpixel rendering that AE uses a fairly unique thing? I mean how does Premiere/Combustion/dedicated cap gens render frames? It only ever seems to be AE I have a problem with.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

[Dave LaRonde] “Jimmy, this isn’t brain surgery. Just open up an AE comp, do a RAM preview at full resolution, then do a RAM preview at half-resolution, and note the difference, okay?”

Dave, I think we’ve definitely got wires crossed here! I know setting res to half, qtr, etc speeds things up..I do it all the time. I’m talking about physically shrinking the comp window aswell. As in: com window @ 100% half res vs. comp window at 50% half res.

I can’t see a difference in speed here, I guess I must have misread the initial post. Maybe most ppl have prefs set up so comp window shrimnk automatically when you lower res, I don’t.

Nehmind!

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Did you get it working properly yet?

I know some plugins don’t benefit from multicore processing, but I wouldn’t have thought you can’t pre-render them at all…hope not anyway. Haven’t got Nucleo yet..

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0