[Kevin Camp]

cc cylinder will take and image and wrap it in a circle/cylinder. you can posistion a 3d camera in the center and then rotate the cylinder (you may need to rotate it via the effect settings) or the camera.

is that what you’re looking for?

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

yep, you need to go to the multiprocessing preference in ae and enable it. it will tell you how many additional processors will be used with the current ram cache settings. if it doesn’t say 7 additional processors, then you can set your ram cache in the memory/cache settings preference, lowering the ram cache to 1gb or less (8gb / 8cores = 1gb).

if you want to check your performance against others, barefeats.com has a graph benchmarking various macs with multiprocessing on and off and a link to the old totalbenchmark project that has been used for benchmarking ae for a few years now. so you can compare directly with those results, and show your boss the difference between 8-cores multiprocessing versus the standard ae render engine.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

do you just want the text field to update by changing the comp’s name?

this as the text source expression will put the comp name as the source text:

thisComp.name

if you duplicate the comp in the project window and change the name of the comp, it will change the source text of that comp.

however, it will only update the from ‘source name’…. i.e. if you duplicate it as a nested comp in another comp and rename that, it will not update the source. at that point, when you rename the nested comp, it is considered renaming a layer (their is a difference between ‘layer name’ and ‘source name’), and i’m not sure you can direct the text source to look a comp’s new ‘layer name’ within another comp.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

using the logic i used for 2k film to ntsc… for 2k film to pal i think a rate of 6 would be better.

essentiall, i think you need to look at the 2k comp height (1554) and devide that by pal height (576) and get a number around 2.7… cheat a little (like i did before) and round to 3.

so for the credit move comp, set the comp to a height of 3 x 576 = 1728. but keep the 2k comp width, so the comp size would be 2048×1728.

the rate for the move will need to be a multiple of 3 and even (like 6) if you need it to work for field renders:

rate = 6; // this could be 3 if rendering progressive in pal comp
x = position.value[0];
y = position.value[1] – ((time / thisComp.frameDuration) * rate);
[x, y]

you can now take the credit roll comp and drop that into a 2k (2048×1554) comp and render for film. you can also take the same credit roll comp and drop it into a pal (720×576) comp and scale it 33.33% (one third) and have it work there too, although you may need to make a framerate change in the credit roll comp to match the pal (25fps).

remember, though, if you are only creating a credit roll for sd pal you would only need to worry about whole pixel movement or even pixel movement, you wouldn’t need to be concerned about scaling factors between a 2k resolution and pal resolution. an there is a pretty easy to use flickerfree preset for that.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

true…

you could modify dan’s expression for a random value:

n = random(2,5);
n * time

i’m not sure if it needs to be a whole number. if it does:

n = Math.round(random(2,5));
n * time

the numbers 2 and 5 are arbitrary… its just saying pick a number between 2 and 5, so set accordingly.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you can do the film reel and unfurling of the film in c4d, pretty easily. for the film, just create the shape that you need, jsut a flat ribbon like shape, it won’t actually move so it shoul be pretty simple. then animate the film texture along the ribbon shape.

if you were to use cc cylinder, you could would render the front (a setting in the effect) and place that on the reel… depending on the perspective of the reel, it may need to be two halves, one below the film and one above in the layer order.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i highly recommend reading dave’s explanation and solution of the problem in the thread he listed…

but if you use the expression i wrote, it’s been significantly rewritten to allow key framing the start and end positions, so download the latest flickerfree preset. if you have an earlier version of ae (earlier than ae7) let me know and i’ll try to make an older version… i’ve been meaning to make one, just haven’t gotten around to it.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’m not familiar with your pc, but if it has multiple processors or cores, you can enable cs3 to use multiprocessing in the preferences. this will speed up renders and ram previews.

also, if you can live without disk cache enabled, this can help speed things up. if you need disk cache for some renders, set your raid0 for the drive to use for caching.

i’m not a big fan of opengl in ae, but if you check the help file for opengl, you will find a list of accelerated features and effects… if you use those feature/effects a lot in projects (things liike blending modes, motion blur, curves, gausian blur, etc.), then setting ae to use opengl always for previews, and also creating a render setting that enables opengl for final render (a check box in the render settings) may help out. however, opengl can get a bit flakey, so if things don’t seem to be working quite right in a project, try not using opengl and see if that helps.

the lag for the ram preview may be due to the compression of the footage you are effecting… do you notice the same lag if you were to generate effect without any footage? like if you just put in a layer with fractal noise, animate the evolutions and ram preview, do you see the same pause?

i’ve noticed that using footage that is compressed by a codec that uses temporal (or interframe) compression tends to create a pause prior to ram preview. using image sequences of any type, uncompressed formats or lossless animation codec are all good ways to avoid temporal compression.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

if you want all 4 processors to work all the time for rendering and previews you will need version cs3 or nucleo pro (from gridiron software). if you have either of these, then you will also need additional ram to feed the processors… the recommended minimum is 1gb per processor.

i have cs3 and a 4-core mac with 4gb ram and to get all 4 processors to work, i actually need to lower the default ram cache in ae, otherwise i only have enough ram for 3 cores. however it is interesting that restricting the ram cache to add a processor didn’t speed things up any more. although there was a noticeable difference just enabling multiprocessing, about a 1.6x boost (note that some effects and features in ae are multiprocessor aware already, and enabling multiprocessing doesn’t improve those).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

one other way to speed things up in ae, is to not use formats/codecs that use temporal (or intrerframe) compression… use uncompressed, lossless animation (with compression keyframes off) or image sequences.

when files have interframe compression (like mpeg), ae has to take data from that frame and then other frames to composite the frame you are seeing and then composite the effects, and that can slow things down.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW