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You can’t avoid that. It’s AE’s filtering on 3D layers. Only setting layers to draft mode can minimize the effect somewhat.

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I suspect this is a limitation of the CoDec itself. I think the Matrox tools themselves use simply different routines to create those large files in the first place and somehow bypass the Windows AVI wrapper. If so, then you cannot do anything about it, but if the tools you mentioned split the file at the strict binary stream level, then there would be no degradation at all, so I wouldn’t worry.

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No, spline tension is a global property of the NURBS objects. You best bet woul be to convert your shape into a polygon cage for a HyperNURBS object. You can then control creasing using edge weight maps.

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[bumpthekoala] “is there any way to split the two 500 gig drives in a RAID 0 configuration and make one my boot drive and the other my content drive (I just learned about this stuff yesterday)

Depends on how it is made a RAID. If it’s software only, it would be in your system’s drive manager (My Computer –> right click –> Manage –> Storage Device manager). You’d simply unlink the two disks and need to reformat them. If it’s a hardware RAID, you would have to follow similar procedures by going to your BIOS or launching a special setup utility from disk in command line mode. You should have docs on that or consult Dell (considering you pay 3 years warranty, they shoudl definitely help you on this)

[bumpthekoala]
Are my dual GeForce 8800GTX video cards that much slower than a Quadro card for graphics editing?

No, speed is not the issue here. Quadros provide more options for configuring OpenGL and a few other things. If you’re really unhappy, you should find a tool called SoftQuadro which will fool your computer into thinking you have real Quadros and give access to those options. Your cards are very new, so said tool may not have them in its list and you’ll have to wait a while.

[bumpthekoala]
Did I back myself into a corner with my current set up?

No, I just wouldn’t use Media Center Edition as it’s a bit limiting which in part also pertains to some of the configuration issues I explained above. Win XP professional would have been better, considering you were spending so much money on the system in the first place. It would also allow you to configure separate users, so your wife and children can use your computer without completely messing it up. You can’t do that with Media Center Edition. ;o)

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Create a long line shaped solid, put the anchor point near one edge then make it target the other point using this simple code on the orientation property:

lookAt(position,thisComp.layer(“target”).position)

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This behavior is normal. C4Ds FFD deformer works based on the proximity of the vertices, not the cross-section. To get similar behavior as in XSI, you will have to add many more subdivisions or use different methods entirely (like the muscle deformer in MOCCA for instance).

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[Jason Connolly] “Is this true that this is a limitation in C4D??”

Yes, it is.

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Most likely these are simply antialiasing problems. Have you tried some of the more Advanced algorithms like Sinc? Also in that case increase the number of minimum samples.

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Umm, rendered video? That sounds like trouble in the first place. Are you sure your CoDec even supports Alpha? If it does, then you probably simply forgot to enable Alpha on the render settings. It’s off by default.

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What do you mean by flicker? Frame-by-frame irregularities in your specular highlights? If so, turn off the auto-light/ auto exposure option in the render settings.

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