[Jonny Webb]

i’ve been having some fun with PIP in AE, but i dont understand how to crop a clip. i guess i’m using the wrong terminology. i just cant find the answer anywhere. Any ideas?

More Info: i have a clip of a choir. i duplicated the clip and scaled it up so i have a closeup of a couple of singers. i want these faces to be the picture in picture. but i need to crop the clip so i can see the choir in the background…

[Jonny Webb]

THank you.
That was what i needed to hear. i did this a couple of years ago, and of course only have the final product, not the project files.

I am interested in doing it in AE – could you give me a starting point, especially any terminology, so i can explore this further…

thanks again, Jon

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++

[Jonny Webb]

And Finally…

I’ve come to the conclusion that useing Warp Stabilizer in PP is not worth the effort. It definately does not work as well as in AE.

As for speed etc, i’ve been reading alot and it seems the bottleneck is the graphics card. Warp, and a few other effects, are heavily dependent on CUDA. So the more CUDAs on the graphics card, the faster the effects are processed.
Apparently there is a limit – a few hundred CUDAs is all that AE can utilise, but thats in the price range of thousands.

I think its time for a better graphics card.

(hope this helps others)

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++

[Jonny Webb]

UPDATE: i had to leave my comp for an hour. And when i returned nothing has changed. So PP definately doesnt do anything ‘in the background’. At lease regarding Warp Stab.
And it still does do SynthEdges like AE’s version.
And my comps memory useage is 8Gb compared to AEs 6-7GB.

Hum! Not impressed. I dont think i’ll be buying any upgrades soon.

[Jonny Webb]

I actually forgot PP now does WStab – and that was why i installed it in the first place. Typical late night working eh?

So i gave it a go, and noticed that it does behave rather differently.
The Analysing is slightly slower, 19mins not 16mins (could be other influences there)

But after Stabilization, nothing seems to work correctly. The default settings, as far as i can tell the same as in AE, results in most of the picture being sliced off leaving a very-letterbox look.
My other favorite, Synth-Edges, doesnt appear to work at all, the corners & edges have black bits (AE managed to fill them in!)

And annoyingly no progress bar to say PP is even trying to do anything front or background. (and my cpu usage implies nothing is actually going on). So i dont think this filter actually works in PP.

I’m going to try again later with a small clip to see if PP can match AE.
Thanks for the help.

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++

[Jonny Webb]

nothing open except AE CS6
(all possible windows background services stopped, but i also tried with defaults)

import 4min clip of DV Type 1
make a comp from selection (checked settings, all good)

apply warp stablilizer, default settings…

waiting 17 mins. Task Mgr CPU = 25% (+/- 3%). Memory = 2.6GB (out of 12GB). Individual graphs of cpus are all very low – only the first seems to jump to 40% now and then…

AE Settings: yes to Multiple Frames Simultaneously
Installed cores = 4, Ram/bg=1GB, Actual CPUs used=3

Likewise – i’ve added the finished comp to RenderQueue, chosen Best Settings and Lossless, and clicked Render…

Estimated Time: 3Hrs
CPUs: (all 4 jumped to 100% for a couple of secs) now settled down to 70% (memoory 6GB)

So is this really is as good as it gets – or does your machine touch 100% for rendering?

[Jonny Webb]

THanks alot for the detailed workflow. This is exactly what i wanted to hear about for a long time. I’m going to give it a try and see if it suits my current tasks.
THnaks again, J

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++

[Jonny Webb]

THanks for the comment.
I did a lot of reading before choosing a codec and Huffyuv appeared to beat Lagarith in most comparisons.
I think my problem was not dealing with the interlace…

I’m still not totally clear on whats the best way forward, but some type of deinterlace does seem to be the best step for my future needs…

[Jonny Webb]

i only have v55 at the mo. And the WarpStabilize in AE is soooooo much slower than DeShake with no noticeable difference in results !!!
But i will try v6 as soon as i download the demos.

Oh, and i dont need to worry about rolling shutter as this media is from old camcorders with CMOS not CCD (or was it vice versa, or… – dont remember, i read way too much yesterday about all that.) Bottom line – my footage does not have Rolling Shutter issues.

[Jonny Webb]

Update: I’ve been trying VirtualDub and its amazingly cool. With it i have done DeShake, remove Interlace, and save as Huffyuv (lossless decompressed).

So now if i can figure out how to batch all this…

And why did i buy creative suite? At this rate i’ll be a convert to freeware/open source…