[Johannes Schwarz]

Alight,

It seems while in principle it might work for some projects, it does not work for mine. The dots are long lines in my case and even if the tracker would track their movemebt, it would not be able to place the object connected to the null in a meaningful way (i.e. place the pen on the line).

But for other people it might work.

Other ideas, anyone?

[Johannes Schwarz]

Thanks John,

that actually sounds like a clever idea. In my case, since I have a plain white background it should be an easy track. I’ll give it a shot.

Other suggestions welcome 🙂

[Johannes Schwarz]

Thanks for the tip.

I monitored CPU and RAM during a preview render. CPU goes up to 100% and pretty much stays up there. RAM goes up to 10 or so gigs (for the total usage out of my 12). So it also reaches the upper limit considering my settings allocate 9 gigs to AE

What I’ll be doing:
I have 1080p animation video animations, that will be combined with time remapped green screen footage, motion blur, large texture layers blending with the footage and the occasional effect. I guess it is not the most taxing work you can throw at AE, but if I can speed up the workflow (mainly preview render times) to make it as “real time” as possible, that would be great.

Generally I’m not too worried about final output renders. I’ll let it do this during the night and it will be in small 3 minute chunks, so no big problem here

[Johannes Schwarz]

Thanks for the response.
My mobo will max out at 24 GB.

Ram would be a cheap upgrade too, as I could get 24 gb for only 150 usd.

[Johannes Schwarz]

Thanks Eric,

Since I will go over the animation in after effects adding footage to it, I guess, the 1080p @ 23.98 will be the only one I need from them.

Greetings,
Johannes

[Johannes Schwarz]

Ok, I originally wrote this post in another forum. Now I realize, that I searched in that other forum. I repeated the search here and came up with this proposal:

Should I ask the animator for 1080p with a 24 (23,98) frame rate?
Then, use this for a blu-ray and resize the materialto make an NTSC 24p (actually 23,98) DVD which will play both in NTSC and PAL countries?

Thanks for you input,
Johannes

[Johannes Schwarz]

Hi,

Thanks again for your reply. I did animate the stroke end percentage, but I haven’t gotten the expression to work yet. If I don’t, then I’ve found a way round. Instead of alternating stills, I just record a video of the hand changing positions. Then I stabilize the motion around the tip of the pen and parent it to the null so it follows the motion of the line being drawn on. It will lack the staccato feel, but I think it will do.

If it works on your end, could I kindly ask you to share the project file, to see where my mistake is?

Thanks Dan for your help,
Johannes

[Johannes Schwarz]

Dear Dan,

thanks very much for your response and your time to look at this. I followed your suggestion. As I scrub through the timeline however the slider remains constant at -180.

Thanks for you help,
Johannes

[Johannes Schwarz]

Alright,

Just in case anyone searches these forums for this kind of thing, I let you know what I went with.
I found an example of what I was looking for:
https://www.vimeo.com/13149563

David Cribbin was so kind as to explain me his procedure and this is what I ended up doing:

1) I went to photoshop and typed a text.
2) On a new layer I traced the text with the brush tool (thickness as desired) using my wacom graphire pen
3) On yet another layer repeat step 2
4) delete original text layer
4) Import the two remaining layers into AE
5) alternate the layers every 3 frames
6) voila

[Johannes Schwarz]

Thanks for the helpful suggestions. I’ll play around a little 🙂