[Matthew Woods]

Thanks Todd.

Let me know when the AE feature request is back up. I would really like a float all panes/no master window feature. It would help out us Exposé addicted multi monitor mac people out who like to leave other windows (like Creative Cow tutorials) visible while AE is in the forground.

Cheers

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

Thats too bad. I just went to add it as a feature request, but I can’t seem to find After Effects in that feature request drop down menu.

Am I blind?

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

Memory is really important for AE. It should cost only $80 or so to upgrade to 4GB of RAM and that should help a lot. My rule of thumb is about 2-3s gig of RAM per processor used, + 1 gig leftover for finder/system operations. By that calculation, you are still short a gig for even single process use. Maybe snow leopard uses more memory than leopard, so it spares less for AE.

I don’t know that a solid state drive is much faster than a physical one. I thought the big advantage of those was no moving parts and less power consumption. Personally, if you do a lot of AE work, I’d invest in a desktop. I think AE needs the horsepower and screen size.

[Matthew Woods]

PS. Where do you buy your ram? As long as you don’t buy from Apple, ram doesn’t cost any more for a mac than a PC. I never buy from Apple.

[Matthew Woods]

I haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, so can’t speak from experience, but have you tried setting both Quicktime and the OS to 32 bit mode? I seem to recall hearing about some problem with 64 bit Quicktime and pro video apps. Also you could try trashing the preferences. Sometimes a corrupt preference file can do screwy things.
What are you trying to render? Are you sure you aren’t doing something computationally heavier than shots you have done in the past? High resolutions + certain heavy effects can easily cause some very long render times for a forty second shot using a single processor.

[Matthew Woods]

If you want a visual example of a practical fire effect, I put one here.
It was for a Children’s interactive piece we did for the Chicago History Museum.
We just needed a wipe, so the effect is probably a simpler than Dave’s.
It was done about 4 years ago, shot on mini dv in a garage, yet it looked great.

https://www.paperdragongames.com/ChicagoSoundDemo.mov

The clip also contains a Creative Cow appropriate shot of a Cow licking the camera. 🙂

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

No problem. Glad I could help.
Its easy to miss things like that when you are too close to a project.

Cheers,

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

I did a similar effect where I burned green origami paper against a black background and chroma keyed into the green. It worked really well.

On a side note, you might want to reconsider abbreviating your logo to K. K. K. with a burning effect. Bad connotations.

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

Done.

Thanks,

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

Hi Dave,

I thought that by replying to this post that it would get moved to the front of the cow forums, but it doesn’t look like that happened. I assume you replied because you were subscribed. Should I make a new thread about this?

I didn’t want to create a new thread when it looked like there was already a relevant one.

-Matt