[John Williams]

Hi Esther, after testing this file it looks like it’s an unsupported by Adobe software (i tried on Premiere, Encoder, After Effects & Bridge.) However, it does open fine in FCPX. Therefore if you need to convert lots of files, I would recommend using ‘Compressor’ which is Apple’s equivalent of Media Encoder, you will be able to import multiple files and encode them into whichever format you need.

Compressor can be found on the App store and costs approx £30.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

If you’re having issues and need to convert the files, try Transcoding on import into Premiere rather than going via Media Encoder.

New Project / Ingest settings / Transcode

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

WeTransfer is best.

Can you see my email address from my user?

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Perhaps try running the latest Premiere Pro update (came out last week) but make sure Media Encoder is up to date also.

If still no joy, you could send me one of your QT files (preferably a small one I can try out.)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Best method is to use a touch sensitive devise like a drawing tablet as this will use the pressure of your pen to determine the width of the pen stroke.

Alternatively, Adobe Illustrator gives loads of creative options for changing your you pen / paint stroke during drawing.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi Martin, you might also consider Cinema 4D.

Much like the After Effects camera tracker, you can run an Object tracker in Cinema 4D to track an object to a face. Using a large number of tracking points could generate a point cloud to give you the contours of the face that the tattoo’s should map along while the object tracker results will give you the movement. Obviously this depends on the type and quality of the shot you are working with but will be more powerful than After Effect and Mocha alone and infinitely more user friendly than Flame or some other CGI application.

The full version of Cinema 4D is available for 14 trial on their web site.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi Ammar, you can do almost anything in After Effects, including what you have asked, however, the experience and amount of time you have will be a very big factor.

For both your requests, if you have the project available that this was made on then it will be relatively straight forward, however, if this is just a video clip then you will need a lot more time to replace and recreate both elements.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

I’d also consider what lenses you are using as a bit factor.

I use a pancake lens on my DSLR for low light situations and get great F-stops and beautiful depth regardless of camera.

Also, you might want to pimp up your light as the with this’ll be cheaper than spending on camera or lenses and the more light you have the more options you’ll get with your camera.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

If it is a bug on your system and until that’s resolved you need to convert the files, could I recommend you use the Media Encoder. If you set up a Watch Folder, then every file that gets put in there will be converted using the format you specify. SO you can have your animators render/move their ProRes Files into that folder and they’ll get converted and put where you specify without you needing to do anything.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Have you checked all your settings:

Is the render set to Classic 3D (Cinema 4D or Raytraced render will really slow things down)
What is the Shadow Map resolution (in the renderer options set to?)
What bit depth are you working at 8, 16, 32bit float (unless you’re working on film on high end broadcast you don’t need to work above 8bpc.
Is the Comp size the correct resolution for you (or is it a UHD comp for a standard HD export)

With DOF, you’ll get a quicker renders if you add it manually as a series of adjustment layers using the GPU accelerated Gaussian Blur rather than inbuilt camera depth of field, but it sounds like you’re not using this.

With motion blur, have you tried in the comp settings reducing the ‘sample per frame’ as the default level is only needed for big movements, if your motion blur is for smaller moves it will process quicker with fewer samples.

Generally with After Effects, if you’re assets are uncompressed (ideally uncompressed TIF files) rather than compressed JPG’s or compressed Quicktime/MPEG… movie files things will run a lot quicker as the software doesn’t have to unpack and decode every frame.

Also, a big factor in speed can be the choice of effects you are using and the size of layers, i.e. if you are using a grain effect on a small image which is part of a large file (like a small layer from a large PSD) AE will often process the entire layer rather than just the visible pixels, so cropping things before bringing them into AE speeds things up for both working and rendering.

Finally, even if you don’t have access to a render farm, you can run the After Effects Render Engine on every spare machine in your office (over night or at lunch) and get each machine to render a batch of frames (as it’s always better to export a high quality image format for big renders rather than trying to make a movie file.) Then those images sequences can be combined (in AE or Premiere) and exported to whatever your delivery format it. I’ve had to use this countless times on heavy renders, especially ones using advanced 3d.

Hope something there provides some sort of performance / life improvements;)

John Williams

Soho Editors