[Jon Bagge]

Turning on Separate Fields in After Effects will cause aliasing in the composition viewer whether the footage is actually interlaced or not.

The viewer will always show the image on a whole frame. When you separate fields, the first field will be placed on the whole frame (this is what you see), and the second field will be placed 0.5 frames later in time. When you then turn on field render in the render queue it will render a frame every 0.5 frames sampling the footage at these times. If you have separated the fields correctly and field render the same way the footage will look correct.

If you field render progressive footage, it will use a duplicate of the full frame every field. The footage may look like it stutters compared to any key framed animation.

If you progressive render interlaced footage (that have been correctly separated) it will only ever use the first field for rendering, and you will get aliasing in the render too.

You can use frame blending or pixel motion to fix some of these issues, but if you’re going to render differently from your footage you should look into a plugin that properly deinterlaces/reinterlaces depending on what your final result should be.

As for your specific footage, if it was originally shot progressive and FCP has interpreted it as interlaced, that shouldn’t really change the footage itself. (unless you’ve rendered deinterlacing or reinterlacing in FCP which I’m sure there is a plugin that can do)
You should be able to interpret as progressive in AE. If you get horizontal banding in areas of fast movement when you interpret progressive in AE that’s a sign the original footage was in fact shot interlaced.

This is all a bit complicated, apologies in advance if I haven’t made myself clear.

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http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

It sounds to me like you need to increase the amount of RAM per process. 1GB may not be enough for what you’re doing. To make that work you’ll need to reduce the number of AE processes.
This should take care of the problem and alleviate the need to use the secret menu.

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http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Continuous rasterization though is not compatible with the puppet tool effect. The puppet tool always remembers the original position of the pins, and if the underlying layer changes it will all go wrong.

To make this work with illustrator make a large composition (size of your final output or larger), put the illustrator file in and scale up to fill the frame. Turn on contious rasterization. This should now be sharp.

Put this subcomp inside another comp and apply the puppet tool.

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http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

1440×1080 is an anamorphic format. It will look 4:3 unless whatever you use to display it knows it’s anamorphic and uses non-square pixels.

What’s your final delivery format?

Generally speaking I’d recommend you use 1920×1080 framesize from as early on in your production as possible. That way any graphics or changes are done at full HD.
So I’d use 1920×1080 already in Premiere. But if you’ve done your editing already, just set AE up for 1920×1080. Make sure you interpret the footage correctly.

If you’re somehow delivering in HDV (who does that??) I guess you can stick with 1440 throughout, you just have to make sure that whatever software plays your project can handle non-square pixels.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Maybe you should take a look at good old Lightworks. https://www.lightworksbeta.com/

It used to be the big NLE for serious film editors back in the day, before cool and hip Avid took over the world. Now that’s a long time ago..

Anyway, it’s now open source and free.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Or you can look at Dell T5500 or T7500 workstations.
I have a T7500 which has 12 memory slots (if you have two processors).

Dell or HP workstation or a Mac Pro are all good solid machines.

You might want to look at refurbished if you’re trying to save money, these things aren’t cheap.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

I just have a general, albeit simple question. If AE is a true 64-bit program, then why does it even need the MultiProc feature? Shouldn’t be able to gobble up the entire processor(s) by default?

64 bit has nothing whatsoever to do with multi processing. It just means it can address more memory.

Now, I know that not all x64 programs are created equal, but I find it hard to believe that AE can’t take up 800% CPU (on an 8-core Mac) in the same manner that Cinema4D is able to work. The most CPU I’ve ever seen the standard AE process take is about 300%.

For multi processing to work the program has to be specifically written to be able to split the work up into individual chunks that can be rendered on separate cores. If a calculation on one core depends on the result of a calculation on another, it will have to wait. There are plenty of effects where it’s either hard or impossible to break up the work in this way.

In AE you can have an incredible amount of layers with different effects on them, and it’s not trivial to work out how to share this across cores.
That’s why in AE you can run multiple copies of the application on separate cores, each rendering a frame. Most effects don’t depend on information from other frames (although some do).

In Cinema 4D each pixel in the frame is a separate calculation (at least for the most part) and so it’s much easier to split the frame up into units that can be spread across cores.

Having said all that, I can easilly get AE to use 80-95% CPU across 16 cores (8 cores with multithreading) for certain type of projects.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

You are importing your PSD as a composition right?

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

The problem is that After Effects renders effects before transforms. So the ‘drop shadow’ effect doesn’t know that you’re scaling the image.

Another solution apart from what’s been suggested is to use Layer Style -> Drop Shadow. Layer styles are applied last in the render order, so it should scale to the image.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

All my layers are pretty much in one PSD file. I’ve never done a proxy render, so I am assuming that if I resize them in PS and there is a way to save a proxy from that and have AE recognize it?

And this won’t mess up my anchor points and alignments?

I’ll do a little bit more research on it to see what I can come up with.

If you resize them in photoshop then you will have to realign everything. So don’t.

The fact that they’re in the same file shouldn’t matter, AE pretty much treats each PS layer from the same file as a seperate source in the project window, so you should be able to render proxies for some/all of the PS layers in the same/different sizes.

Read up on proxies in the manual/adobe site. Proxies are very very useful for a number of things. I use proxies both in low resolution to speed up workflow prior to final render, and full res proxies to speed up final render.
When you’ve got the basics of it I’m sure we can guide you through any questions you might have.

————–
http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects