[Richard Herd]

I can’t remember which one, but try the Effect > Channel

You’ll want to do that a few ways as an experiment: on the top layer, on the bottom layer — and there are several channels to choose.

Please let us know what/if you find something 🙂

[Richard Herd]

It doesn’t really matter anymore. It used to matter when animating stills or using video because dynamic link changed all that. RAM previews are rendered out regardless.

One good thing though is to go to File > Project Settings > Working Space > [choose the one you are delivering to]

[Richard Herd]

[Jerry Smith] “whether I need them”

You do.

Here’s a technique.

Make your camera. Make two nulls. Turn the nulls to 3D.

Name one null “Camera Truck” and name the other null “Camera Rotator.”

Show the Position on the Camera Truck. On the camera hit A then shift-P. Hold option as you click the stop watch, and pick whip the A to the position on the camera truck, and then pick whip the P to the position on the camera truck. You won’t see anything, until you set the Z value of the position on the camera truck to -2667.7 (on the 50mm camera). last Parent the camera to the Rotator. Hit r, and swivel the camera, set keyframes, move the camera all around.

It’s the most efficient way to multiplane.

[Richard Herd]

Render order is everything.

SMET

Source
Mask
Effects
Transformations

When you precomp, in effect that makes that Precomp a source. That’s a feature not a bug. The thing you’re looking at that’s driving you mad is the antialiasing. There’s a switch for that. Deselect it and see if that helps.

[Richard Herd]

I use Prelude and Adobe Media Encoder to transcode all the video into the same exact everything.

[Richard Herd]

Not sure I understand the question.

OPT+SHIFT CLICK on a parameter and it will hide. For example, if you don’t want to see Position, then OPT+SHIFT CLICK it and it will disapear.

[Richard Herd]

[Jerry Smith] “render times have gone through the roof”

You definitely need a pay raise. But also you can mess with render settings, for which there are dozens of tutorials and theories and opinions. Having said that, you can also save valuable render time with decent network settings.

After Effects > Preferences > Media and Disk Cache > Enable Disk Cache and then read all the stuff there. Generally speaking, you want 3 drives: a system drive, a media drive, a disk cache. That way in all cases you are reading/writing to different drives all the time, rather than trying to read and write to the same drive.

After Effects > Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing > After Effects Multiprocessing > Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously … but I can never seem to get this right and have stopped messing with it, truth be told.

I have also found that if I Dynamic Link the final composition into Premiere (close After Effects) and render through media encoder, then I get faster renders and more options that seem easier to control, for me. In the Premiere settings, I also set the Premiere > Preferences > Media > Media Cache Files & Media Cache Database to the exact same folder as the AE preferences mentioned above. Then in AE, choose Composition > Cache Work Area in Background. My understanding is that now AE and PP are sharing cache files. Please note I use CS6, and hopefully in CC 2015, this is more straightforward.

EDIT: In Adobe Media Encoder > Preferences > Media > same location as Premiere and After Effects.

[Richard Herd]

[Oliver Peters] “your own transcoded “masters” or editing proxies”

Have you used Prelude for that, by any chance? (I have not and am curious the user experience.)

Thanks!

[Richard Herd]

THANKS!!

[Richard Herd]

Yep. It’s par for the course.

EDIT: You can also use nesting to “group” things, but and this is a big BUT it makes delivering audio stems a bit difficult.