[Jon Bagge]

Thanks man ! 🙂 You are awesome !:)) it worked perfectly, i dont know how much time i spent figuring out this phenomena. Now everything works perfectly!

No problem. I’ve been working with the puppet tool alot the past few months, so I’m getting to learn it’s habits, good and bad!

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

[Jon Bagge]

Select the puppet pin effect, enable the puppet pin tool and turn on the mesh. The mesh needs to encompass the whole picture or strange things will happen on the edges. You can expand the size of the mesh by adjusting the ‘expansion’ parameter right next to the ‘show mesh’ tick button. You want it as small as possible yet covering the whole image.

You can also increase the number of triangles in your mesh to reduce artifacting. Bear in mind this will significantly increase rendering times.

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

[Jon Bagge]

I just looked at your project, and you’ve done exactly what I guessed. You haven’t turned on continuous rasterization in your main title sequence comp.

Do that for all your text layers and it’s sharp as a very sharp knife!

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

[Jon Bagge]

Have you got the text layer in a subcomp and are doing the scaling/animation in a main comp without continuous rasterization?
It must be something to do with how you’ve set the animation up.

Or have you by accident clicked the ‘draft quality’ button? Although that shouldn’t transfer through to the final render.

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

[Jon Bagge]

First of all, just to check all the bases, you have tried clicking on the ‘toggle transparency grid’ button at the bottom of the composition window? That should confirm whether AE can see your alpha channel or not.

AE has to put something behind your image since you can’t see through your monitor… By default this is black (or you can change the colour in the composition settings), or it can be a grid like in photoshop.

If you can see the grid then you have transparency, and you can composite elements behind it. If you have a black border around the image then you’ve set it to interpret straight matte when in fact it’s premultiplied. If you have unwanted transparency around the edge, then you’ve interpreted it premultiplied when in fact it’s straight.

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

[Jon Bagge]

If all your footage is as dark (and similar colour to the background) as that, you’re going to have to roto it.
You might be able to combine keying, rotobrush and manual rotoscoping to save some work. But ultimately it will come down to the footage what will work best.

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

[Jon Bagge]

PAL 720×576 (16×9 Header)
16:9 FHA (14:9 title safe)
I’m not fully sure of what “PAL 720×576 (16×9 Header)” means.

It means anamorphic 720×576 (PAR 1.46) Unless I’m mistaken, “16:9 header” just means the clock/header before the film needs to be anamorphic too.
PAL is also 25fps.

The simplest option is just to convert the finished project to the correct size/framerate. But this won’t look so good.

As long as you don’t have any video footage you can change your AE project to render properly in PAL which will look very good (better than your NTSC project in fact).
Change your comp size to ‘PAL D1/DV Widescreen’. You’ll need to scale everything up just over 20% (there are scripts for this)
You should be able to simply change the framerate of the comp to 25fps. AE works in fractions of seconds, so for most keyframed work this should work perfectly.

There may be certain effects that will give you some trouble, and it’s possible moving layers won’t line up exactly.

Hope that will get you started.

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

[Jon Bagge]

First of all CUDA does nothing in AE, and the graphics card should certainly be at the bottom of your list for required components.

I have 48GB in my workstation, and AE will easilly use all of it. I have 8 cores with hyperthreading turned on, so 16 potential threads.
I normally run 8 AE threads, with 3GB/thread, and 8GB for other apps.
For renders than need lots of disk access, I might reduce the number of threads.

Remember that even if each extra thread can have max 3GB (not sure why), the main AE application will eat into your memory very fast if you work with complicated HD projects. Especially in 32bit.

I’d certainly recommend you having 32GB in an 8 core machine. Whether having 48GB is worth the extra cost is hard to tell.
On a 12 core machine though, I think you should seriously consider 48GB if you can afford it. Certainly no less than 24GB, or you might as well go with an 8 core.

But as Roland also mentioned fast disks are important too.

In the end this will all somewhat depend on what kind of projects you do.

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

[Jon Bagge]

As far as I know this doesn’t work with MC5 and CS5. I’ve tried it lots of different ways, searched through Adobe/Avid forums and found nobody else who can make it work either.

Whether it’s the new version of Avid or Adobe that’s at fault, I don’t know.

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

[Jon Bagge]

I’m willing to bet money on that video being made from a still image using the techniques mentioned. You can see the footage is ‘warping’ rather than actually moving naturally.

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