Lars Bunch
Forum Replies Created
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Hi,
I’m not sure if this would help, but one thing that can cause a “juttery” animation is if you are rendering a progressive animation and then playing it on an interlaced monitor. While not grossly annoying, this can look unpleasant and rendering interlaced might smooth things out.
Alternatively if you are rendering an interlaced animation and the field order gets reversed, this can look really bad on an interlaced monitor (although it should look fine on a computer monitor.) NTSC is usually lower (even) field dominant.
Is the animation intended to play on a computer monitor? The 600×800 comp seems non-standard so I am assuming it is not for television. If that is the case then, I suppose, interlacing wouldn’t be an issue.
Is it possible that your hard drive cannot handle the bandwidth necessary to play the animation? In that case the animation might be perfectly fine, but that it needs to be on a RAID to play back at full speed.
Anyway, I know these are pretty boneheaded ideas, but those are the things that immediately come to mind.
Another possibility is that they are scrolling fast and that some motion blur would help them look better. If there is no blur in the motion, that could cause a “shaky” or “stuttery” look.
I hope this helps, or at least someone comes up with a better answer to your question.
Lars
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Hi,
I’m not sure if this would help, but one thing that can cause a “juttery” animation is if you are rendering a progressive animation and then playing it on an interlaced monitor. While not grossly annoying, this can look unpleasant and rendering interlaced might smooth things out.
Alternatively if you are rendering an interlaced animation and the field order gets reversed, this can look really bad on an interlaced monitor (although it should look fine on a computer monitor.) NTSC is usually lower (even) field dominant.
Is the animation intended to play on a computer monitor? The 600×800 comp seems non-standard so I am assuming it is not for television. If that is the case then, I suppose, interlacing wouldn’t be an issue.
Is it possible that your hard drive cannot handle the bandwidth necessary to play the animation? In that case the animation might be perfectly fine, but that it needs to be on a RAID to play back at full speed.
Anyway, I know these are pretty boneheaded ideas, but those are the things that immediately come to mind.
Another possibility is that they are scrolling fast and that some motion blur would help them look better. If there is no blur in the motion, that could cause a “shaky” or “stuttery” look.
I hope this helps, or at least someone comes up with a better answer to your question.
Lars
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Hi,
Of course it can be done. In fact, you don’t even need to compress the files. Of course it might be faster to put the video on a firewire drive and then walk it to the client – even if the client is across the country.
There are a lot of variables to consider before dismissing the idea, however. Particularly, what is the length of the video you want to ftp? If it is short.. under a few minutes, for example, and you want to get it to a client who is across the country, then that method might be very useful. For anything longer, you are probably better off shipping a firewire drive to a post house that can print to tape rather than trying to ftp the file.
While h.264 can look really good, you can lose color saturation and fidelity if you are not careful. You need to experiment and tweak the compression settings to make sure the video looks okay before you commit to compressing a large file.
You might want to consider Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm codec. It costs $100 for the encoding module, but the play back module is free… What is really swell about this codec is that it is lossless and can support alpha channels. You would have to make sure the post house that would receive the file can install the playback codec, but any technically savvy post house shouldn’t have a problem with this. Supposedly it provides very good compression without losing visual information.
Obviously unless you have some really, really high speed connections on both ends, files that get up into the over 1 Gigabyte range are probably going to be more trouble than it is worth.
If what you are looking to do is simply ftp the file rather than putting it on a drive and taking it to the post house down the street then in may not be worth the effort.
What it comes down to is this; is it a faster and/or better use of your time to deal with ftp than it is to put the file on a drive and take it to a post house? If you use a lossy codec, will the loss in quality needed to get the file down to an acceptable size be acceptable to your client?
In the past I have preferred to use an uncompressed format, copied to a firewire drive and hauled the 15 miles to the client’s studio (even for 10 second long animations) rather than risk the loss in quality that would be needed to squeeze them through the phone lines.
That said, if you live in Circle, Alaska, ftp is going to be your best friend. (well… maybe the moose will be your best friend, but that’s a post for a completely different forum.)
Hope this helps,
Lars
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Hi,
The replacement cards from Apple were upgrades to higher performance cards.
If I remember correctly, the first did not come with extra drivers and I know I did not install any new drivers when I moved it to another computer.
When I upgraded to a 30 inch monitor with the Nvidia GeForece 6800 GT video card that was needed to run it, it did come with a driver and I probably installed it, although I don’t remember doing so.
Apart from what appeared to be a driver conflict with a Wacom tablet, I have never had anything that appeared to be a hardware or driver issue with AE.
Lars
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Hi,
The only time I have run into problems with AE dumping out of a render (usually minutes after I left work for the day) has been due to having many large layers in the project.
A couple of people here suggested I go to the secret AE preference menu and set set “Purge every xxx frames during Make Movie” to 30. Anyway, this did the trick for me.
You get into the secret preference menu by holding down the right shift key as you select one of the preference menu items. Then go to the preference page select pull down menu and the last one should be labled secret.
But if you’ve done this already and you are still having a problem, I suppose it could be a hardware issue. I wouldn’t think AE would care what sort of graphics card you had or even if you didn’t have one at all while it is rendering.
I have only replaced graphics cards with ones supplied by Apple, so hopefully others here can advise you on replacements, should you need to go in that direction.
Anyway, my system is a Dual 2 gig G5 with 3 Gigs ram so it’s a little closer to the one that is causing you problems. Hopefully it is just a matter of not using the available ram as efficiently in the older systems and that the secret menu issue does the trick.
Hope this helps,
Lars
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Hi,
Basically you cut out your foreground elements in photoshop (or Shake, if you’ve got it) and save those with an alpha channel. Then you save a version of the image as a background… Here you have to use photoshop to replace and fill in background material where the foreground element was.
Either that or you can place your cut out foreground over another background.
In AE, you place each element in 3D space, placing the background deeper in Z space. Create a camera with a wide angle lens if you want to exagerate the effect, and then create your move.
The work in AE is pretty basic… what is time consuming is the cutting out and background replacement in photoshop. If you haven’t used it before, this is a fine time to become acquainted with the path pallet and the pen tool. You can draw a path around the element you want to cut out and then convert it to a selection later when you want to extract it and create your alpha channel.
If you have Shake, it has some very useful keying and rotoscoping tools that speed up this kind of work.
Mostly it just takes a lot of practice and a good grasp of object relationships in 3D space.
Hope this helps,
Lars
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Hi,
In the render queue, there is a small arrow right next to “output to” where you set the filename. Click on that and select “custom” This will give you a window that allows you to change the naming convention.
At any rate, it works this way in AE 7.
Hope this helps,
Lars
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Hi,
There are a number of things that might have gone wrong, some completely disasterous and some pretty easily fixed.
I had an Western Digital firewire drive that failed on me and all I had to do was rip thing thing apart, take out the off-the-shelf hard drive and plug it into a spare firewire bridge. You can get firewire bridges from most computer stores – basically they are sold as a build-it-yourself firewire drive with all the parts except the hard drive. The one thing you will want to make sure of is whether the drive is ATA or SATA. Probably the best approach here is to take the drive to a repair shop you trust and ask if they can place the drive in a new bridge just to see if it is the brige that died.
I have also had good results with data recovery programs. I hear disk warrior is very good. I had a Lacie 500 Gig Raid drive fail and the program saved almost all my data.
There are some cases where all is lost from the start, but in my experience, if you have a very sudden failure, it usually ends up being a fairly easy fix whereas when you see a slow progression of more and more minor problems until the whole system crokes, it is usually a problem that is harder to solve.
At any rate, what is important is to not panic and try drastic measures.
Good luck
Lars
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Hi,
This is more about Compressor and DVD Studio Pro that FCP, but it might be useful to you.
On the issue of stuttering, field dominence can definitly create problems. You are usually best off assuming lower field first for NTSC, but not always. I believe that DVCam is always lower field first, and frankly, I’ve never had occasion to use upper field first in NTSC, but it does exist.
One really irritating problem that took me a long time to solve was I would work on a project and then use Compressor with DVD Studio Pro to make a DVD. Compressor defaults to guessing the field dominence and it’s not a very good guesser. If it gets it wrong, you will get really bad stuttering when the video is played back on an interlaced monitor. What makes it difficult to figure out is that if you play the DVD on your progressive computer monitor, the problem doesn’t show up. It’s only once you’ve burned the DVD and are playing it on a TV that you can see the stuttering. My solution was to create a template in Compressor to tell it to ALWAYS assume lower field dominence when making the MPEG2 file. (Obviously if you are working with Upper field material, you will have to create a template to compress based on Upper field dominence.)
Hope this helps,
Lars