[Matthew Woods]

Why not just render an entire sequence of black/empty/dummy frames with the same naming convention that your Max sequence has? You could then copy your rendered max frames into that folder overwriting the black frames. As you work in max, you can render into this folder gradually overwriting the rest of your dummy frames.

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[Matthew Woods]

I meant 1000 frames. I misspoke. Thanks for tip though. This may be working. I think its probably easiest to render out a 1000 frame comp, then time stretch the rendered version. I’m still having to do a lot of setting tweeking, trying to get it to fill the frame by the end, but the particles do pile nicely, and its starting to look cool, and I think it might work. My comp is starting to get very heavy towards the end… 🙂

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
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[Matthew Woods]

Good to know some people like it. I went through the protocols before, but I still found it slow and awkward. Maybe I’m missing something and should go over them again. It sounds like correcting brush strokes are supposed to propagate in both directions, but they only seem to propagate later for me.

I’ve gotten very good at traditional rotoscoping over the years (it was my first paid AE job), so that might be part of it too.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

I find the Multiprocessing Prefs misleading. The caption “Actual CPUs that will be used” should instead read “Number of AE rendering instances”

When using the Multiprocessing settings, AE spawns multiple copies of itself in the background to render. These background render copies can themselves use multiprocessing. If you spawn too many of these, and they are all trying to use more than one processor, they can step on each other’s toes and slow things down.

I have an 8 core hyper-threaded mac pro.
I find it generally works best when I set the maximum ram allocation per CPU,
and restrict it to using no more than the number of real (not virtual) cores – 2.
In my case 6, in your case 10.

Even with these settings, I regularly see it maxing all CPUs when rendering.
Sometimes I only see 6 maxed, it depends on what I’m rendering.

I also use a really handy utility called iStat Menus:
https://bjango.com/apps/istatmenus/

It puts my processor usage bars up in the menu bar.

You should see a steady use of processors when rendering.
If you see your processor use is oscillating between full and zero,
your background processes are stepping on each other’s toes, and
you should reduce the number of processors you are telling AE to use.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Youtube streams 720p, so I’d make output your composition as a 720p. I’d also probably pick medium quality photo jpeg compression for the render out of AE. If the file size is still too big, I’d compress it to H264 with other software (I’d use Apple Compressor) AE doesn’t render temporally compressed codecs like H264 very well, so I wouldn’t try to render it straight out of AE.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

I’ve been drooling over this keyboard:

https://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

I use enough different software with lots of different keyboard shortcuts that it would be really helpful.
Can’t see spending $2400 on it though.

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

loopOut(“continue”) was what I was looking for.
I couldn’t remember it.

Thanks both for the helpful replies!

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Are you sure its not auto saving because its crashing?
After Effects will often do an automatic save when it realizes that it has crashed or become unstable.
It usually saves the file in the same folder with the original with an _# after it. Sometimes this save file preserves your work, sometimes its corrupt. If the crash save hangs, the save file is usually corrupt.

Two things I might try to keep it from crashing.

1. Try trashing your preferences. (home/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects) I find that AE’s preferences can often get corrupted and cause weird crashes. If this works, and you are running time machine, you can restore to an old version of your prefs very easily.

2. Are you pasting some weird formatting with your text? I often use a program called Plain Clip:
https://www.bluem.net/en/mac/plain-clip/ To strip the formatting from my text before I paste it into AE.

Also, I found AE CS4 to be really buggy on the mac. It was in my opinion, a downgrade from CS3 because it introduced more bugs than useful features. I’m loving CS5 though, so I would seriously consider upgrading.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

I can’t seem to get desktop video to work on any monitor. I’ve tried turning it on and off switching monitors etc. No avail. Other than that, things are working ok. I’ve ended up just moving the program window up to the monitor I wanted as a desktop preview, and making it large. It could be the large nonstandard resolution of my program. (2048×1536).

Surprised you are having issues with Alpha channels in premier. I haven’t run into that yet. Its doing a surprisingly good job of integrating a whole bunch of different formats some with alphas, and previewing without renders.

As to the 4 monitors, they aren’t very good monitors, scavenged from various places around the office, I just like the added space. Its kind of a Brazil/Scanner Darkly looking setup with a whole bunch of mismatched monitors in different orientations. I have a main apple monitor, a small dell monitor on the right for pallets, an hp monitor on the left in portrait orientation, and an upside down LG monitor lashed to a shelf above my desk.

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com

[Matthew Woods]

Thanks for your help Johnathan. I got it working. Much faster, although I’m seeing some glitching with clips set to different blending modes dissolving. One thing I haven’t gotten working though is desktop playback. With the addition of the GTX285 card, I now have room for 4 monitors, I am trying to set one of them (connected to the GTX) as a desktop video playback monitor. In the project settings, I have “Desktop Video Display During Playback” checked, and the appropriate monitor selected as an External device, but I don’t see the video displayed there. Just the desktop. Any advice?

Thanks,

-Matt

Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com