[Les Nemeth]

Print front and back on 2 separate papers, cut, and glue.

Or take it to Kinko’s or some other service.

[Les Nemeth]

https://painting.about.com/cs/printing/a/gilceeprints_2.htm

[Les Nemeth]

https://www.lynda.com

[Les Nemeth]

https://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator.html

[Les Nemeth]

The free xform tool don’t have an input method (eg number controls where you input the degree, etc) therefore once it’s done it’s done. You can only approximate another object to it by trial and error.

However, if you know the principles of perspective drawing, you can define the horizon, vanishing points and lines, and using them as a guide you can position/distort the new object which will approximate the distortion of the original object – again, by somewhat of a trial and error basis, but at least the vanishing lines provide as a guide.

There are also other ways to approximate, such as by distorting the object by a mesh, or using the 3D effect. Using the 3D effect for perspective distortion would be more correct, since it provides an input method, and therefore it’s easy to recreate a specific transformation based on the original one.

[Les Nemeth]

You are right. Don’t know if it’s intentional or broken. The solution is, don’t use BMP. Use TIFF. When you export, you can specify to use the artboard for export.

If you gotta have BMP, then go into PS and save the exported TIF as BMP.

[Les Nemeth]

So what is the problem? You can’t export BMPs from AI, or you don’t know how to use CS4 crop areas, or both?

In CS4 you use the “Artboard Tool” to set the crop area and it’s size. It’s somewhat different to use than in CS3. When you export, whatever is within the area that is defined by the Artboard Tool, will be exported.

Just look up Artboard Tool in the help file.
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/Illustrator/14.0/WS0939CFEE-49EF-4c6f-B337-8897EC89DF89.html#WS714a382cdf7d304e7e07d0100196cbc5f-6328a

[Les Nemeth]

Unfortunately, I don’t know. There prolly is, but maybe isn’t.

However, what immediately come to mind – as a quick and dirty solution – is this:
1. select the camera so it’s path is visible and hide everything else. make it so it’s on a black or white BG
2. do a screenshot and bring it into photoshop
3. crop it to the comp’s size
4. bring it back the ae as the top layer
5. adjust opacity and/or layer blending so it will be always visible and still you can see all other items

[Les Nemeth]

I think you’re right Kev, I might’ve put an extra “8” in the multiplication up there. In that case, it’s even better. Less memory usage!

>>”have you compared the purge frame method to setting the ram cache to 15%…? or, to disabling mp but not using the secret preference to purge frames?”
If I have MP enabled, there’s no way I can set the RAM cache that low because running on 3G, AE will definitely crash or hang. I guess it will just not clear the cache itself (or at least not efficiently) unless it’s being set in the “Secret” place.

If I disable MP, the only drawback to that is I will have 3 cores just idling and rendering will take unnecessarily long. Which is better then crashing, of course.

Of course, it won’t exactly be 15%. It all depends on how much RAM you have and whether it’s 15% or 17% or even maybe 10% will depending on how many background services will clutter the system – which take up a few extra megs.

All in all, if an HD frame takes up about 6M, and I clear the cache, say, after each 20 frames, that would need about 120M or RAM. So this would allow you to set your RAM cache pretty low, and enable all cores at the same time for fast rendering even on a 3G machine.

[Les Nemeth]

I’ve read a few times that suggestion, to disable the “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” feature.

I remember long time ago I’ve also read about that “Secret” preferences, but completely forgot about it. So yesterday when I found it again, it helped me with my pain I used to experience.

In the “Secret” setting (holding Shift while bringing up Preferences), setting the “Purge Every X frames during movie making” to a low number it really helps. And that allows me to set the render multiple frames simultaneously checked even at 4G (3G technically on 32bit OS).

Example.

If you render HD (1900×1080) your buffer for 1 frame would be:
1900 x 1080 x 3 (3 is for red + green + blue) * 8 (8 bits = 1 byte) = about 48M for a frame (hope I’m correct :-).

So if you set the “Purge Every X frames during movie making” to 1, it will purge the buffer after every frame, and the buffer only will be 48M.

Yesterday, I tried this, set the Purge Every frame… to 15, set my RAM cache to 15% (!!!) and rendered multiple frames at 720×480 a 4 minute sequence, on 4G (using only 3G on 32bit).

It went through that sequence like knife through butter without any issues! Mmmmmm goodie! (The reason I set the RAM cache to 15% is because that was the setting which enabled all cores for rendering. You can see that in the prefs dialog under “Multiprocessing”.)

I did different experiments with this, and of course clearing the frame buffer does have some overhead. When I specify to clear every 4 frames (1 per core – so I thought), the sequence rendered in 9’15”. When I set it to clear at every 15 frames, it rendered exactly 9′ – saving 15 seconds.

So, all in all, definitely interesting.