[Mike Smith]

Just for clarity, does this include Vegas users – now on the same drivers as PPro..??

Thanks

[Mike Smith]

Thanks guys.

[Mike Smith]

Hi Sidney

How do you find Velocity ? I have fond memories of the DPS family of products from PVR days. For those of us wondering about PPro alternatives,do you find it a good hardware / software combo?

Sorry can’t help with any gotchas.

[Mike Smith]

I’d go along with that – it’s a lot of extra money for gains your customer may never see.

If there’s something special and short, though, you might consider cutting and rendering a DV edit, then importing that into AE for color and effects work before outputting an uncompressed file – which should compress a little cleaner to mpeg2 for DVD than a DV master will … though you might want a better Compressor.

Otherwise, the “next big thing” is high definition … if there’s an investment / learning time decision coming up, it might be worth starting to think about HDV / HDTV workflows now, with FCP 6 maybe due an’ all …

[Mike Smith]

Indeed. Or even to look around at what else’s on offer on the Windows platform – Avid Pro HD, Avid Liquid, Vegas, Edius, no doubt others … not to mention ReelDVD, DVD Workshop … I have a lot of the Adobe apps but don’t qualify for a bundle. It might make sense to keep Photoshop and AE going, and look around for alternatives for the rest …

[Mike Smith]

Hi Walter

I guess the plus of going to uncompressed comes in the extra colour space for grading / timing, and for effects and graphics work.

Of course the (DVCAM) camera footage gains no extra info in going uncompressed (via SDI if you have a DVCAM deck with SDI out, or via software conversion), but for broadcast the additional colour information will allow better results when the final color correction, effects and graphics have been added.

But you add a lot of extra data handling, storage requirement and system load for your gains. So if your output requirements are corporate / DVD / vhs, as Andy’s seem to be from his website, then I guess those costs may outweigh the benefits.

[Mike Smith]

Sadly, the results described are all too recognisable to me. Macromedia, of course, had a very dominant market position with once with Freehand, then with Director, now with Flash. There’s a little more competition in the video tools arena … anyone seen Jashaka …?

https://www.jahshaka.org/
Maybe those guys will do a good job in the end …

[Mike Smith]

Sounds like you need all the RAM your system can use – which will be 2 gig. Even so, that’s a big pre-comp – are you zoomed is so close that you need that much for your final output ..?

Good luck with it!

[Mike Smith]

Hi J.

I’ve never seen a buffer underrun error message from AE. It echoes back to the early days of trying to write to CDROM – Nothing to do with AE, unless you’re trying to burn to disc without rendering – which I doubt! What message exactly do you get, and what are you doing at the time?

Buffer underrun implies data is not being made available fast enough to your host process – let’s assume video playback system; though since AE does not try to play back video in real time if the data’s not available it’s a surprising problem.

By and large, for system speed, you’d likely want to keep your hard disc(s) defragmented, keep a good amount of spare hard disc space, and if at all possible keep your video and AE project files and temporary files on a drive separate from the system drive …

This sounds to me like an error that you may need to fix, and not one that additional hardware will resolve.

[Mike Smith]

Increasing your RAM to 2 Gig should be cheap and quite effective in giving you a speed boost. It’s always tricky to know when to add extra hardware, and when to upgrade a whole system. If your P4 is reasonably recent then it should be quite quick anyway – weren’t the very first ones 1.4 or 1.5 GHz? My vote would go the RAM …