[Lon Lawson]

K figured it out. PreComped all six layers, used Color Range with the min/max of RGB channels at 215 to 230, fuzzed it a little, then had a solid Gray at 220 behind the PreComp.

[Lon Lawson]

You nailed it, it was layer styles. I had color overlay on everything that wasn’t red. I thought I had ruled that out as a culprit due to the behavior of the layers without layer styles, but obviously not. Seems as though layer styles on one 3d layer ruins the whole order for the rest of the layers.

[Lon Lawson]

Oh man. Thank you so much. That was driving me crazy.

[Lon Lawson]

The CMD + . has worked since, I’ve tried it out a few times on smaller sequences. Also, simply playing the timeline will stop it sometimes.

Maybe I had such a large timeline that it just couldn’t handle it, like a ram thing.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

[Lon Lawson]

I was mashing CMD + . furiously for about ten minutes to try to cancel it. I tried every combination I could. Unless it doesn’t work when it detects seething anger, it doesn’t work on my machine.

_ L

[Lon Lawson]

Thanks for the response. Show Marked Waveforms works great, thanks.

CMD + . didn’t work for me, I tried it a lot.

I usually just hit H to zoom in and let the system energy plot the few seconds, but this time, man, it locked up my system for 40 minutes!

Running v4.0.5 btw

Thanks again.

[Lon Lawson]

Okay folks, I’m back on this project (moved homes in interim).

I tried re-transcoding the mpeg file to an Animation Quicktime using Apex, and it’s no better. The compression is just too severe in some places, artifacts are present.

So I captured the footage again using Final Cut Pro. In fact, I have a FCP system at my disposal now, however I cannot edit on it or run AE on it. I must run AE on my PC.

So anyway, FCP and compressor has been completely useless for me. I have tried exporting the file through Quicktime, Compressor, or Quicktime conversion, getting various error messages the entire time. Compressor seems unable to export any file over 300mb. I get a lot of “file too big” errors, despite the hard drive being 930gb.

I don’t have a specific question, other than how. the. hell. do. you. get. this. to. work.

I’ve been going this kind of stuff for years now, never ran into anything so complicated for such a simple f’n task. I think God doesn’t want me to finish this or something.

[Lon Lawson]

Wow, this has been complicated. Whatever could go wrong, has.

The final file is 130gb.

For some reason, it’s only 29fps and there’s no audio. The more I think about how that’s even possible, the more it feels like my brain is melting.

Since I can’t edit in HD, I converted the file again to Microsoft DV and did an offline edit, then imported the Premiere project into AE and switched the footage to the HD stuff.

The footage looks great, but there’s some artifacts in the shadows of two shots. The original mpeg does not have these artifacts, so a re-transcoding of the whole thing might be necessary.

I need to find a better transcoding program.

[Lon Lawson]

I’m using the Apex Video Converter to Quicktime Animation right now. It’s been going for three hours, the file is 47% done, and the size is 65gb already.

Niiiiice.

I’ll let you know how this turns out.

[Lon Lawson]

Oh yeah, I’m expecting huge files and understand that reality. I’ve been tinkering with WinAVI all day, which doesn’t do MOV files.

I captured this large file on a friend’s machine in Premiere CS3, which I don’t have. I cannot bring the file into Premiere.

I’m going to try Apex Video Converter to transcode the file to the animation mov codec.

Thanks again for the info.