[Joe Moya]

There are a few ways…

… the easiest way would be to create your 3D looking picture of lines and points in Photoshop (or AE)… then use the puppet tool to stretch and move the lines (and points).

This will not look like the 3D object in your sample since that was done with a 3D application… but, you can make it look as if it is 3D if you create a good 3D picture with photoshop (or AE).

[Joe Moya]

sounds like you need to resize either the mask to fit the face or resize the face to fit the mask

[Joe Moya]

If you are tryinig to rotoscope the entire lady in the picture… then, you will need a LOT of time, patience and LUCK.

You will have to make a choice between saving the hair or dropping the background out. If it was me… I would sacrifice the hair… as for the blur, that is a BIG problem and there is no simple solution (… if any solution)… specially when you look at the foreground plants in the video.

If there is any way to reshoot… then, that would definately be the best option. If not, then prepare for a LOOONG and painful rotoscoping project…. and, in the end… I doubt it will look good.

[Joe Moya]

Best bang for the buck… Blender. But… it has a very steep learning curve. Blender is not easy to learn or use.

[Joe Moya]

“I’m thinking the reason that this particular project is taking 6 hours vs. 2 hours is because it has a lot of precomps at the 5000×1080 pixel size.”

That is correct?

Why does AE work like this, and is there any preference that can help with this?

Because that is how Adobe originally wrote the code… Adobe is very RAM dependent instead of HD-cache dependent… in the original days, RAM was the fastest processing memory available and Hard Drive cache systems were slow(er). That is not as true as it was in the past… however, Adobe is stuck with code that is RAM driven and therfore hits memory limits very quickly. All that being said, compositing software in general puts very heavy loads on computer systems and you might want to reduce your expectations of performance (in general) when compared to editing software.

There are preferences that might help speed up the process… BUT… it is not not going to be significant when you are using the size of layer you described. The only real solution is load your machine with a lot of RAM. When CS5 comes out, the 64 bit OS should help significantlyl… until then, you need lots of CPU cores and lots of RAM.

The best solution is to figure out a way to NOT use such a large layer of 5000 by 1080.

[Joe Moya]

Chances are your are using more than 25% of your RAM… you just don’t realize it… and…yea… that sounds a bit lame. But… this is how AE works.

If you hold CTL>ALT>DEL keys simultantiously you will see Windows Task Manager window pop up… click the Processes tab and you should see one AfterEffects.exe file using CPU time for each CPU processors you have installed.

This means that AE is using multiple exe files to execute code for you… RAM useage is normal (at least for me) to be in the 25-45% range… You can increase the amount of RAM used by increasing the amount of total RAM, but the percentage of useage will not change dramatically because it AE is dividing more RAM per processer per exe file.

The last I looked the optimal CPU useage of RAM is about 2G reserved for OS and 2.0-2.5G of RAM per CPU cores available. So if you have two Cores available… the optimal RAM amount would be 2G for OS plus 2-2.5Gs per Core… which is (2 or 2.5)x2 = 4-5Gs. Total optimal RAM is (2+4) 6G to 7G (2+5).

[Joe Moya]

The DSLR camera’s look really nice… I am still shooting using HV30/40’s with Letus DOF lenses (…which at the time I bought them were a big leap in camera tech). I will be moving to the DSLR video process when the second generation DSLR’s come about AND when the NLE’s catch up to the compression codecs the DSLR’s use.

I swear that Canon, Sony and Panasonic have a room full of engineers who only job is to make the editing software/application engineers life miserable.

At this point, the only “simple” solution seems to be keep using older applications that seem to have no problems with relatively common mpeg HD formats… with Avid Liquid being one… and, apparantly Premiere Elements as well. Although, a second options I have only recently started to use is Cineform as a transcoder… to date, using Cineform seems to do two things at once… it creates a proxy like format that makes HD work very smoothly and fast and also appears to be lossless as compared to a uncompressed format. I am not sold on the “lossless” aspects – yet… but, it definately is faster to work with although it creates HUGE files. I think time will tell what kind of bugs this work flow will create, but for now it seems to work well enough.

[Joe Moya]

When you say “generated in Premiere Pro”… do you mean captured through PremPro? If so, then perhaps that could be the reason for your success… however, frequently I recieved video to edit that may have been capture through various applications (…with HDV Split being a very popular application).

Avid has a similar system where that if you capture through AVID’s MC it puts a MXF wrapper around the m2t file and works like a charm… however, AVID also thinks the world revolves around it’s propriatary MXF wrapper. As a result, it is difficult to use the AVID captured video with After Effects or just about any other NLE or compositing software.

So far, the only solution I have found that works consistently is to use Cineform to convert all HD video to a common codec… or… just use Avid Liquid for my editing application and forget about wasting time by re-rendering into an acceptable PremPro codec.

[Joe Moya]

Thanks for the “creating the plane and project the 2D video on the plane idea” idea…. sounds like a plan… but, I think it is going to have problems with the way I have the camera movements setup. I am certain it will reveal the lack of 3D needed to “sell” the look I have going.

That leaves me with the idea of building a particle object in a 3D software application…. then, exporting the particle object/sparkle as an zxo file as the end cap. OR…you mentioned buidling a sparkle effect in AE in a 3D layer… will that work when using ProAnimator and Serpertine? Will you get the same effect tracking a trapcode particular created sparkle for burning section of the fuse AND still get a reasonable 3D look with the sparkle?

[Joe Moya]

Before converting video source using Cineform… I didn’t use Prem Pro to Edit… that pretty much solves almost every problem I have when editing… basically, if I don’t use Prem Pro as my primary editing application… I don’t have many problems editing.

I prefer to use Avid Liquid… simple, powerful and (for the price) offers a lot (…years ahead of it’s time in it’s capabilities). But… more importantly, it is WAAAAY more stable than Prem Pro.

Unfortunately, Liquid is End Of Line software that is (supposedly) to be replaced very soon with a NexGen version to be put out by AVID. In fact, as of a few days ago… Avid took it off the Pinnacle/Avid site as an option to buy. Which could mean they are about to announce that NexGen version of Liquid.

Or, it could be that AVID bought it out a few years ago to simply kill off an editing software that could have easily put AVID out of business in the prosumer category… as a result, no NexGen will be brought to the market. Personally, I think they will repackage the Liquid to fit more into the AVID line but jack up the price and water down Liquid’s capacity to do things better than Avids MC. As it stands, Liquid is a product that competes against AVID’s own professional level editing software but a price at about 1/3 the cost. (Note: AVID bought out Pinnacle Liquid and Studio a few years agos)

I am only using Prem Pro because I find it to be a plan “B” if Liquid is not replaced. Once you experience more stable editing software like Avid MC,Avid Liquid or Vega (and some say Edius as well). You suddenly realize what you are dealing with when it comes to Adobe editing software. That being said, I think Adobe will spend more time trying to produce a better NLE and will (hopefully) catch up to other NLE’s (specially in terms of stability and multi video format acceptance and use). In fact, you just experience the instability I noted. And… to fix it you have to spend $125 to fix it in a very effective way… while with a 3 yrs. old Avid Liquid you could just drop most common HD formats into the the Liquid time line and work natively (i.e., with absolutely no re-rendering). BTW, AVCHD is not common – yet.

Now… I did experiment for some time trying to figure how to use m2t type videos formats with Prem Pro… and, I was partially successful… but, it such a convoluted method that only works sometimes makes it not worth even attempting and easier to just use cineform’s neoscene. (BTW, you can probably do a search of this site and find a detail explaination of how I achieved this conversion of m2t files with Prem Pro… but, I wouldn’t recommend it because it is not that effective). The key reason I use Adobe applications is for Photoshop and After Effects… and, Audition is pretty useful…. Prem. Pro just comes with the Production Studio package.