[Mark Hollis]

Yes.

Is your logo bigger than the raster? If you resize in Premiere, the application may be applying the original limitations of the raster to the image.

Try doing a resize in Photoshop or Illustrator. Better yet, do the drop shadow in those applications so you don’t have to in Premiere. Remember, you can add transparency to alpha.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You can also simply install the Apple ProRes codec on your machine.

Mind you, I have not tried this but it does, apparently, work on other systems (like the ones made by Avid).

A word of warning: If you want to share the end result with anyone else, you need to output your final project with something other than the Apple ProRes codec.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

One big factor with Quicktime is the issue with gamma curves which, if you play a scene back on the Mac looks correct, on Windows does not look correct. Apple may have decided to “fix” this by changing the default gamma curve for Snow Leopard (to be the same as the PC). One wonders how Apple’s new 64-bit Quicktime Pro in Snow Leopard will deal with legacy gammas, Snow Leopard gamma and so on. In the meantime, I don’t see Apple releasing a 64-bit version of Quicktime Pro for Vista or for Windows 7 yet — but there is hope yet.

I am aware that Avid, which writes code for the DS, had to literally reverse-engineer a 64-bit engine for making Quicktime for their 64-bit DS application, which runs on the 64-bit version of Windows XP Pro. That must have been a monumental task for them, as they suffer from chronic understaffing of programmers and lots of demand from the field to keep the DS up with competing applications.

I’m happy to see that there is a workaround.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

1080 may refer to a video resolution. It is not necessarily a film resolution. The most predominant film resolutions that are being used are 2K at 2048×1080 and 4K at 4096×2160 for DI work. Those resolutions are width x height.

Before anyone can answer the question, one needs to know what resolution Kendrick will be working in.

Hate to answer a question with a question but there it is.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Do you actually think your viewers at home would be able to discern trillions of colors?

Quicktime may well be broken in Windows 64, unless or until Apple makes a 64-bit version for Windows. But a close read of Andreas’ posts makes me wonder:

Were you trying to save as Millions of Colors +? You do not get alpha unless it has the “plus.” And that could have been your problem.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Shake got EOLed by Apple — I think a couple of versions of FCS ago. Apple wants everyone to learn Motion that doesn’t really do composite, though it does do text effects.

Having tried to do compositing in FCP and wanting to kill myself while doing that, I’d rather not attempt anything more than 5 layers deep.

Combustion is still out there but it’s a lot more $$ than AE.

System I was on is the Avid DS. The DS does do compositing and is also an editor and finisher. Doesn’t have all of the pre-done effects that AE has, though you can build your own tools and it has an expressions engine that kinda works. Cheap, too at $60K. PC only, I’m afraid.

So AE is kind of king of the hill until something better comes along at that price point.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I wouldn’t.

You get infinitely more control over sound in FCP or Adobe Premiere Pro. I just did a Premiere–>After Effects–>Premiere gizmo that worked outstandingly. I had 114 layers in AE when all was said and done and simply sucked the result into Premiere Pro to do final audio tweaks.

My final output was a videotape, so I didn’t need to set it up for a DVD, but it worked great.

Render time was about 3 hours in AE. TRT was 4 minutes, 27 seconds.

Of course I’m using some old stuff, too. Premiere Pro 1.5, AE 6.5 and an old Dell XPS 600 with 4G of system RAM.

We plan an upgrade to Macs and FCP but I intend to try to keep Premiere Pro if I need to “wash” something through AE. Workflow is better with the Adobe applications until Apple comes up with something to really challenge AE.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I don’t think that the Windows side of things will necessarily change things much (other than that AE will be very happy to export an AVI in Windows.

The only application that really takes advantage of a 64-bit RAM space is Photoshop, which ought to run fairly quickly. I have seen some pretty nice speedups with Photoshop under Vista.

Did I sound bitter? Didn’t mean to.

Adobe has their hands full writing as fast as they can to make applications for not just one but two operating systems. And the Mac Fanboys get them pretty bent out of shape as they sound like the denizens of Amiga when that platform was dying “but could do everything.”

Adobe has a major installed user base on Apple. And part of this is due to the fact that Microsoft never really, truly figured out prepress. So the prepress houses are pretty happy to curse Adobe.

What I was trying to point out is that Apple warned Adobe that Carbon was going away and that it was only to be used as a transition to Cocoa. And you may recall that Carbon was rolled out in 2000. It’s almost ten years on and Adobe has introduced a lot of new stuff since 2000 and they have had plenty of time to become Mac-compliant.

So I’m not bitter. Frankly, were I running Adobe at this point, I’d be scared. They did buy up as much of their competition as they could, but Quark is still out there and there is now Open Source that may wind up challenging them. Where they stand tall is in the strength of their suite of applications and how they work well together.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Your sudden hard disk usage is probably an “out-of-RAM” indication. But here’s the real problem: Adobe.

They don’t particularly like Mac and they also don’t like Quicktime. They released CS4 with a few evolutionary updates on the Mac side and a 64-bit Photoshop (with the evolutionary updates) on the Windows side. Adobe applications for the Mac are written in the Carbon framework and there is some indication that Carbon (which was supposed to be transitionary between Apple’s System 9 and before to OS X)will never actually fully support 64-bit. Apple has told software engineers that they should be transitioning to Cocoa for years now. And Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch is designed to work with Cocoa applications.

The reason why you experienced a slight slowdown in Snow Leopard may be due to decreased support for Carbon. Certainly, it’s time Adobe engineers came in out of the cold and had a nice cuppa Cocoa. They may yet do that, especially if other companies’ applications switch to Cocoa and derive massive benefit from that (I’m thinking Quark XPress here).

After Effects and all Adobe applications under OS X are 32-bit applications. They are limited to 4G of system RAM — perhaps total. So, in that you have 2G of RAM per processor, you have 2G per thread. But wait: Nehalem processor cores can act like two cores, so you may actually have eight threads running through your system at once.

But if After Effects can only see 4G of RAM because it simply cannot manage more (after all, it cannot take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch), each theoretical thread is looking at .5G max. Or, if it’s inefficient and cannot take advantage of the Nehalem engine, it’s looking at a theoretical 1G max.

Additionally, the multi-processor engine that Adobe developed (mind you, they did this because they were using Carbon and could not use any help from the OS that Apple was building into the Cocoa framework) is rumored to only allow the application to see four processors max.

So I’ll bet the UI is taking out one processor. Three processors are rendering. Nobody can see more than 1G of physical RAM no matter how much you stuff into your system, and you’re immediately off into “virtual memory landia.”

Hard drive starts spinning.

I suppose we could all whine at Adobe and ask them to make their applications more modern.

But pity me!

I bought a Dual-Quad Core system. And under AE, I may only be able to use 3 cores to render. Poor planning on my part, certainly, if all I plan to use are 32-bit Adobe applications.

My last computer lasted 10 years. It was a single-processor G4-400 with a 1GHz processor upgrade and 1.5G of system RAM. Ran CS3 applications just great until I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. If Adobe won’t get out of their own way here, they’ll be overtaken by others’ applications. If I worked for them, I’d be learning Cocoa now.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

The solution here is clearly Adobe After Effects.

I have just finished an under 5-minute presentation of the new laws in effect on October 1st in Connecticut that has about 120 layers in After Effects. There would be fewer in Premiere Pro.

AE is not an editor. I futzed around in AE for a while until I came up with an appropriate workflow which is as follows:

• Lay everything out in Premiere Pro first (I am using 1.5)
• Import the project into AE (Using 6.5).
• Add the graphic and text elements that, in Premiere would be an issue.
• Do the effects on the text and elements.
• Render.
• Import into Premiere Pro.
• Render.
• Output (with audio) to tape and to file.

I kind of wish I didn’t have to render again in Premiere Pro, but my AE output is a full-resolution uncompressed file (as it’s graphics and I don’t want to compress those). I totally love the pre-done text effects in After Effects, as well as the ability to save my own effects. All movement is smooth and looks good. Laying everything out in Premiere Pro simplifies everything.

AE doesn’t work well with audio but you can play back a short stretch of it so that you can mark places where things are supposed to begin and end, where transitions happen and where effects must be completed for easy perception by an audience.

I’m using an old (6 years old) PC and some old software, but it’s pretty clear that Adobe meant for these two products to work together. One caveat: Don’t have both applications open at the same time for a massively-layered project on a 32-bit system. Adobe made Photoshop CS4 into a 64-bit application in Windows Vista. They would do very well to similarly rewrite After Effects. When you get above 80 layers in a composition, AE doesn’t let you preview hardly anything and audio playback is limited to about three or four seconds. My PC has 4G of system RAM and I typically had WordPad as the only other running application (so that I could read the text my producer wanted me to be working with).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?