[Nate Biehl]

Viacheslav,

Thanks for the tip. I will check out those forums.

Nate Biehl

[Nate Biehl]

Thanks Mike!

I always pick the most complicated ways to do things. You’ve saved me a lot of time!

[Nate Biehl]

Seems to work.

Wow.

What the hell am I going to do with all of the time I used to spend pre-rendering?

[Nate Biehl]

I found the answer I was looking for.

Amit Zinman, thanks for the response. I know what you mean about recent work being memory intensive.

My employer just upgraded my system. My old box was so prone to disastrous crashes during long renders that I made pre-rendering a major part of my best practices. A quick render at the end became a point of pride for me, almost like clean code is for a good web designer.

The new box is relatively stable. I find myself easily previewing my way through big projects with a longer render at the end. This is good for my flexibility, but it is not the reviewing situation my employer is accustomed to. Looking for a happy medium.

[Nate Biehl]

I did a DV greenscreen project last year, and I got a noticeable improvement in the cleanliness of the key when I changed the way I captured the footage.

I used Apple’s Shake as my keying/compositing software, and manual recommended changing the capture settings to Uncompressed 4:4:4. I’m not sure how this change affected footage that was originally compressed at 4:1:1, but it seemed to key much cleaner with a lot less aliasing than my first attemts that were captured at DV compression.

The files were ENORMOUS, though, (sorry, I don’t remember exact numbers, but they were much larger than the 4:1:1 files) so consider your storage and rendering limitations if you want to try this. I spent a lot of time trying to explain why the project was taking so long.

[Nate Biehl]

In case someone has the same problem and is searching posts, I believe I’ve fixed it. There is a registry key that disables “executive paging” and keeps “essential” progam functions in the RAM for quick access, forcing all other functions to the swap file. This key can raise hell with Windows 2K, depending on what service pack you’ve got, so try disabling it. Do a google search for “disable executive paging.” You should find instructions on how to enable or disable the registry key.

[Nate Biehl]

Thanks so much for the earlier suggestions…

Unfortunately, a lot has changed in my workstation as of late, as I’ve tried to trim the fat in the services and such to make it run as hot as it possibly can. I knew these change porobably had something to do with my problem, I was just fishing to see if anyone had run into a specific cause that led to this effect.

Aside from freezing occasionally, my machine is running REALLY smooth (up to 90% of memory available on startup, and many apps run faster than the 4-proc XP stations we just spent MASS $$$$ on) so I was hoping I could nix the one bad change and keep most of the overall benefits.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with is different sized page/swap files on different local drives. Does anyone know if this could ead to the problem I’m experiencing? When I cried for help last week, I had two page files set at 1024m each, one on the D drive and one on the E drive.

Thanks again for the responses.

[Nate Biehl]

Any other place I should be posting this question? I could use some help ASAP.

[Nate Biehl]

Thanks for the clarification. Worked like a charm. I can’t wait to use this.
Biehl

[Nate Biehl]

Could you please direct me to the earlier discussion of this subject or go into a little more detail about this method of running multiple applications? The ability to render in the background while still beng able to work would increase my efficiency a great deal, but I don’t understand the above response. Thanks
Nate Biehl