[Richard Herd]

Turn on activity monitor and look at the network tab. Select the Data option, at the bottom, in the middle. Then Window > CPU History; CPU Usage.

In After Effects > Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing (What are your settings there?)

AE > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache (What are your settings there?)

[Richard Herd]

I’m not sure I understand. But something like this?

https://reels.creativecow.net/film/testvid

[Richard Herd]

The Rotobrush is now your friend. 🙂

[Richard Herd]

That’s really hard to do. Fortunately, Adobe has a series of pre-made but hard to find Expressions in their expression sampler. I have shared mine from ages ago here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2S2b7kN6I8iX2VLZ1ZESURuUnM

You want the comp called random rotation. From there, you will have to work through some other details, but the expression, the hard part to write, will work just fine, and you will need to animate the shape layers and probably use a stroke effect and so on.

[Richard Herd]

Creative Director

[Richard Herd]

Her prose style is a bit terse, but Anne is a guru.

Right Click the column in the project pane to reveal the Metadata Display…

From the display choose Video Usage (about half way down, not in alphabetical order).

Now you can see where it is and the playhead will snap to the time.

[Richard Herd]

Crazy. I was just looking up some stuff after last week’s project proved weak sauce on my Mac Tube AMD Fire Pro D300 CS6.

Having said that, I am considering a big move to something like this

https://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-fx-chassis/pd

or

https://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd

Is this too much?

[Richard Herd]

Render order: SMET

Source
Mask
Effects
Transform

[Scott Witthaus] “Created the mask, but when I finished, the cutout went back to the “un-flopped” side rather than over my subject. Is there a way to make the mask “honor” the flop effect?”

The flop effect is 3rd in the stack, but Mask is second. It renders the mask first and then the flop effect (or lower if you used y value).

This is where PreComposing is important. It allows you to turn everything into a SOURCE, which means it’s first in the render stack. Try precomposing your mask layer. And then apply the flop effect there, on the pre comp.

[Richard Herd]

[Dave LaRonde] “who re-renders things six times?
“

I have some clients…sheesh. 😉

[Richard Herd]

But Scott asked

[Scott Witthaus] “Hey all. Is there any “flavor” that AE likes best.”

And the answer is No. After Effects likes them all the same. It really doesn’t matter what footage you’re handed, but if you can demand a particular flavor, Dave makes a good point:

[Dave LaRonde] “Stick with the best codecs you can use” However, if the shooter shot dSLR longGOP 420 and hands you APR422, that is not an increase in the picture quality.

But often we don’t get to choose. The shooter hands us footage and we make a story out of it. In the cases when I’m handed a bunch of mixed stuff, I always put it into Apple Pro Res 422, and then I pick the frame rate that makes sense. Mixed frame rates will drive render times/RAM previews sky high. If AE renders seem sluggish be sure to check the frame rates on all the footage and all the comps.