Kevin Camp
Forum Replies Created
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you’re right, you could use card dance… create a grid of circles (or halftone shape of choice), motion tile would make that easy.
then apply card dance and set the image as one of the gradient layers and set x and y scale to use that gradient layer as its source… intensity would work for black and white halftone, you could use multiple layers, each using a different color to separate channels.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
does it play/scrub fine if you leave the interpret footage at the original frame rate?
the only thing i can think of right now, is that you are running out of ram. try choosing edit>purge>all.
if that doesn’t work tell us more about your footage…. size, frame rate…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
yep, i’ve notice it too… i found that it is only the save function from the effects & presets palette, choose it from the animation menu.
to make it even more odd, if you look for it first in the effects & preset palette and then try the animation menu it won’t work. you must deselect the effects/properties that you want to save and then reselct them and go to the animation menu to save.
if it is just one effect you can also choose the save preset from the animation preset pulldown within the effect.
it’s a pretty wierd issue…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
its clunky, but if you needed a color cmyk halftone, it may be the easiest way (…easiest, free way…).
halftone from pete’s plugins (mention above) will only work with luminance, and thus, will only create a black and with halftone. you can duplicate your image, separate out individual color channels for each, set those channels to luminace, then apply the halftone plugin and use that result as a matte for a colored solid to create a color halftone pattern.
another plugin is retrodots there are more options on it, but for what you are looking for peter warden’s halftone will work just as well, even a bit easier…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
are all your credits on one giant text layer (a text layer created in ae with the text tool), and you are trying to animate the text layer itself in a comp?
i’ve noticed slowdowns in ae7 on a macpro with large text layers created in ae (versus imported from illustrator/photoshop). i also found that for some reason precomping the ae text layer and animating the move of the precomp made it work better, it just made updating the text a little more difficult.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
if you are rendering progressive, and your motion is a horizontal pan, then the vertical blur may not make any difference. the vertical blur trick is to help with problems with interlacing and fine horizontal lines/details.
with uncompressed hd at high frame rates, you actually could exceed the sustained data rate of a sata drive, even a sata raid, unless you have a 4-8 drive raid. so if you are seeing stutters in play back that seem like the media is hanging, then you might want to try rendering to a compressed codec. are you viewing the media in a player, like quicktime, or in an nle?
expressions can be intimidating at first, but they can help a lot… they aren’t to hard to use either, you can just copy and paste them in to the expression field. if the problem is the fine lines/details that are perpendicular to the move of the layer are giving you probelms (so if the vertical lines give you problems as the image pans across the screen) then the issue may be the aliasing taht is due to sub-pixel movement. if that is the case, expressions will help a lot.
just option-click (mac) or ctrl-click?? (pc??) the stopwatch icon for the position property of the layer, then paste one of the expressions into the expression field.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
you’ll just be limited by the number of cores.. the imac only has 2, versus the macpro’s 4 or 8 cores. with cs3, ae’s render engine can render multiple fames simulatneously by using all avalable cores, thus speeding up rendering. with the imac, you’ll only have 2 cores available.
as far as speed, it’s kind of relative. if you are used to a 800 mhz quicksilver, anything in the 2ghz range will seem amazing… but, if you have to make a choice between the cost of ram and the cost of speed, get the ram.
also, if you are looking at older imacs, see how much ram the can hold. i know at least the higher end new version can hold 4gb, which would be ideal for mulitprocessing on a 2-core imac. i would recommend starting out with at least 2gb, and upgrading to 4gb when you can.
if you were looking at a new one, the 24″ 2.4ghz model looks pretty good. you get a large screen, which is good for palette heavy apps like ae. it only comes with a 1gb stick of ram from apple, so you can buy a 2gb stick elsewhere (owc has a 2gb module for $132 or 2x2gb matched pairs for $269). the 320gb internal sata drive is pretty good, and you can get an external firewire/usb drive for media storage.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
it should perform about as well as a macbook pro, actually a little better.
barefeats.com has some photoshop and ae benchmarks of the new imac compared to macpros older imacs and a mbp. if you go back to the main page you can find other benchmarks for the new imac with other software.
i don’t know how concerned i would be about the gpu, opengl rendering in ae is still somewhat flakey, most use it only for previews, and many just disable it all together.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
yep, this sounds correct.
and if he is importing the ae project into premiere, then you don;t need to worry about render settings, interlacing and codecs, so you should be good.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
in addition to what’s been mentioned, you may need to restrict the move to whole pixels to prevent anti-aliasing from rendering the lines differently from frame to frame.
this expression will help to keep the movement to whole pixels:
[Math.round(position[0]),Math.round(position[1])]
it’s simple, but the downside can be potentially uneven movement due to rounding off of values.
you can get more complex with something like this:
xRate = 1;
yRate = 1;
x = position.value[0] – ((time / thisComp.frameDuration) * xRate);
y = position.value[1] – ((time / thisComp.frameDuration) * yRate);
[x, y]this expression will ignore any keyframed positions, and base the movement on the xRate and/or yRate which are simply the number of whole pixels that the layer will move per frame. if you need the layer to move in the opposite direction, enter a negative value for the rate variable. note that if your move is in the y direction and you need to render with fields, you will want the yRate value to be an even number (essentially 1 pixel per field).
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW