[Joseph W. bourke]

Hi Scott –

Yeah, I was pretty shocked at the difference in render times – as I said this was not scientific, but it WAS done with identical projects in which I had collected all the files, so the playing field seemed even to me.

My new system, which I had configured by a local shop here in NH, for about 1600 bucks, consists of this:

Intel Motherboard – DP45SG – this has an ESATA connector for a RAID
Quad Core2 Q9550, 2.83GHz, 1333MHz, L2 12M
8GB of PC3-10600 CL9 DDR3 240p DIMM RAM
GEForce GTX 260 – EVGA graphics card
2 – 500GB Seagate SATA2 7200rpm hard disks – one for OS, one for Applications
2 – 750GB 7200rpm 32mb SATA2 hard drives – for media files – this is NOT striped – at some point I will probably add a RAID array for doing HD – I haven’t tried editing true HD on this pup yet
600watt silent fan power supply – this thing is really quiet – I can probably do audio recording in the same room with this running.
Case – X-Cruiser Black system chassis – this is a gamer case with plenty of room for expansion.

That’s about it, other than that it’s running Vista Business 64-bit. I was originally going to go with XP Pro 64-bit, but I think the upgrade path to Win7 will be smoother, plus Adobe recommends Vista 64 for the CS4 production bundle, and so far, I can see why. This thing screams! I just loaded 40 minutes of cloud footage I shot yesterday in 1080i; it loaded fine in .mts (Canon native format) format into AE, and I was able to speed it up 2000 times, giving me a really nice, smooth time-lapse effect, without the usual light stutter you get when you use the intervalometer setting on a camera. It will render about one and a half minutes or better to RAM with the current 8MB of RAM.

Hope this helps.

Joe Bourke
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia

[Joseph W. bourke]

Here’s my two cents (only worth one cent these days). I just had a system configured around an Intel motherboard (core 2 extreme), running CS4 on Vista 64. No scientific study here, but a project, which I rendered on Windows XP Pro on a 3.0GHz single processor with 4MB of RAM, went like this:

It took one hour and fifty-four minutes to render a project (lots of layers, several effects) on the XP box. The identical project took seven minutes to render on the dual quad machine with Vista 64 bit. Needless to say, I was astounded!

As I say, this is nothing scientific – no benchmarks here – and no desire other than to increase my speed of workflow and efficiency, which this new box has done in spades!

Joe Bourke
Creative Director / B&S Exhibits and Multimedia

[Joseph W. bourke]

Fabian –

If you have the CS4 Production Premium suite, or Soundbooth, you have access to a pretty large (and free) library of music and sound effects. They can be downloaded from the Soundbooth interface – there’s a tab for Resources which will get you to them.

There are some free (albeit fairly low sampling rate) sounds out there on the web – FindSounds.com comes to mind – I’ve used many of them, and tailored a bunch of their sounds in the past – pretty good stuff.

If you’ve got audio editing software, or music software, there’s a wealth of free stuff as well. Search on SoundFonts, and you’ll find a ton of free sound patches to be used in VST plugins for the various music/audio editing packages (such as Sonar and Cubase). If you’re a musician, the average 300 dollar Yamaha synth has a huge library that can be recorded and customized to any computer with a sound card – that way you can really get original. Good luck!

Joe Bourke
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia

[Joseph W. bourke]

Thank you very much for your time Walter –

That clarified everything. I’ve already got a 750MB external drive which I can use for backup, then I’ll price out an external RAID array that will get me rolling as I get into true HD work.

Joe Bourke
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia

[Joseph W. bourke]

Thanks for your advice, Walter. I am a Graphic Designer specializing in motion graphics for trade show exhibits and television productions. I am also a writer/producer/editor, so the system will also be used for longform (short longform – five to fifteen minute industrials and their related elements), as well as presentation loops and animations for trade shows. I also do a fair amount of spot production, 30s and 60s, which I do either in AE or Premiere (I’m just learning Premiere Pro CS4, having worked on Edit* and AVID systems for several years). I also create complete on-air packages for television programming, but that market has mostly been swallowed up by the big players.

Most of my AE projects don’t go beyond forty or fifty layers, but I do quite a bit of effects work, such as tracking (I prefer Combustion for that), keying, and other special effects. I use 3D Studio Max 8 for my 3D work, and have recently purchased the CS4 Production Premium package. My education is in music, so I also do a fair amount of audio work, mostly sound fx, voice overs, and sweetening for the projects I write and produce (these I can do on my existing P4 machine – digital audio isn’t very demanding.

The reason I was thinking about the striped Raid 0 for the media files is future proofing – most of my work is heading toward HD, or at least HDV (for acquisition), and I want to have enough headroom to edit true HD and HDV (for tradeshow booth playback) without waiting for days. It appears that 64bit is the way to go, and I was thinking Vista 64 mostly as an upgrade path to Windows 7. I don’t trust Vista from some of the things I’ve read, but I also know that no new OS is going to be bug free immediately – at least Vista has had some development time. Thanks for your input.

Joe Bourke
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia

[Joseph W. bourke]

Les –

Purely for the upgrade path to Windows 7. Every new OS needs six months to a year to mature and get drivers written for it, and I’m sure that Windows 7 will be no exception.

Joe

[Joseph W. bourke]

Hi Bones –

As you’ve probably thought at some point in this creative process, there is no “best” approach. One good way to brainstorm this is to come up with animations that might fit the content of the text. For example, if one of the words in your animation is “revolve”, you might take the obvious route and actually animate one or two of the letters so that they slowly revolve, while keeping the text readable.

I’ve been seeing some commercials lately on TV which are all text, and the animations, while not contextually created, use text that drops into the frame, and looks as if each line of text is hinged to the one above, so you get sort of a swinging sign look to the text (I’m sure this is done with expressions, which can save you a great amount of time). There are many ways to make multi-line text interact. Write out your script for the video you’re working with, and make notes on it, based on the visual concept of the movie (if that’s where you’re going), or based on your own stream of consciousness (what comes into mind when you see the words).

Here’s a link to a pretty good one based on the Fight Club:

https://zeynepkinli.wordpress.com/tag/typographic-design/

Good luck, and don’t fall into too many “canned” ideas. Look at what’s out there, then make it your own.

Joe Bourke

[Joseph W. bourke]

Jon –

I think there are really only two ways to go, considering that you get what you pay for in Motion Graphics. You can go the cheapo route, where the seller has little or no design experience, a six pack of beer, and a few stock plugins, which don’t get changed from the preset, or you can pay what they’re worth, and get (sometimes) a really flashy looking graphic, AND someone actually makes a living doing what they’re good at.

It boils down to the “no free lunch” corollary: only a fool wants to create something that has six hours worth of work in it, and get paid twenty-five bucks for it. Well designed Motion Graphics take time, talent, and equipment to create.

That said, you’ve got JumpBacks (from Digital Juice), libraries of canned Motion Graphics, some of which are cheesy, some of which are pretty good…none of which are unique images that only one client can have. There’s also RevoStock, a company that sells stock footage and background images…I’m not very familiar with them, but some of their stuff looks pretty good.

If you own After Effects, you can also buy a number of templates from various sellers, such as Andrew Kramer, of VideoCopilot.net. He creates templates, elements, soundFX, presets, you name it, and sells them all at a very decent price. His tutorials are some of the best on the web, but this is only if you’ve got AE.

Artbeats has a huge library, some good, some not so good – depends on what your need and project is – but you will pay what it’s worth; maybe a little more than what it’s worth, considering that you’ve got no exclusivity. Pond5.com has some interesting looking stuff, with clips in the 20 dollar range. Some of them look as if they might have had a bit less than 20 bucks time put into them. It depends on what you’re after. If you’re doing wedding videos, cheese sells. If you’re doing commercial production, or industrials, it depends on the client’s image.

My advice is to do the tutorials, get up to speed yourself, and start designing your own Motion Graphics. Or tie in with someone in the area who can do it, and you be the producer. There’s currently a whole industry of low-ballers who can do a job once for really cheap, then the client moves on to the next low-baller. The client isn’t really well served, and the low-baller never betters his/her craft.

A quote I heard recently smacked so much of the truth that I have to pass it on: A client was complaining to the designer that his quote was too high…the designer’s comeback was: “If you think I’m expensive, wait till you see what it costs you when you hire an amateur!”.

Joe Bourke
MultiMedia & Graphic Design

[Joseph W. bourke]

Hi Frank –

Let me preface this by saying that I know nothing of Motion. But if you want your animation to go from 14 to 28 seconds, you have to cut your playback speed in half. This means that you are going to get some very chunky looking playback – stutter city!

You can set the speed of your playback when you import your clip by setting it to 15fps in the Interpret Footage dialog you get when you right click the clip in the Project. This will make your clip show up in the Comp as 28 seconds long

The only way I know of to smooth things out is to turn on frame blending in AE. You turn it on in the icon bar at the top of the Comp, and then you enable it on with the checkbox to the right of your clip after you put your clip in the comp. There may be other ways to achieve this that I’m not coming up with. Anyone feel free to weigh in with other opinions.

Joe Bourke

[Joseph W. bourke]

Carl –

I believe that if you turn the gravity setting up (and of course make sure that the gravity setting is in the right direction for your scene), and turn the strength setting of the shatter down, you will achieve a fairly realistic glass shatter.

Joe Bourke