[Ridley Walker]

[Gabriel Tougas] “Ridley, merci! I was leaving the colour-correction until later, but your comment made me realize that my background was already at the level I wanted it, so I needed to correct the foreground. Here’s how it turned out: I think it’s really popping now. 😀 I threw a mask over the desk lamp to keep it from blowing out, because I like the shade’s texture. Was that the right decision, you think?
“

From my perspective, its better.

[Ridley Walker]

Pas mal.

The lighting on the subject looks a bit dark, otherwise not bad. I’d adjust the colour balance on the subject using Curves.

The skyline of Montreal looks great.

[Ridley Walker]

For the distortion and displacement you’ll need a 3rd party tool like FreeForm.

You can download a trial version here to see if you can achieve the look you want.

https://www.mettle.com/freeform-pro/

[Ridley Walker]

From After Effects Help:

The color spaces available in After Effects vary based on the color profiles installed on your computer. (See Color profiles.)

Choose File > Project Settings.
Choose a working color space from the Working Space menu.

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS61A9D13D-919A-4010-A3A2-00477A81FDB0a.html

[Ridley Walker]

@ Todd

You should be proud. Thank you, or whoever is responsible for this change.

That’s going to save me (and I assume many many other users) so much fuss.

I’d resorted to turning the preference on and off and would frequently forget which state it was in.

In releases prior to CS6 I’d used Lloyd Alvarez’s Throttle & Purge script to accomplish something similar, but with the new Global Performance Cache and Multiprocessing changes, that no longer works.

[Ridley Walker]

New Features:

https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2013/04/whats-new-changed-after-effects-next.html

“new preference that modifies the existing Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing preference: Only For Render Queue, Not For RAM Preview: If this preference is enabled, then Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing will not be engaged for RAM previews, and background multiprocessing rendering processes will only launch when you initiate a render operation in the render queue”

[Ridley Walker]

The lag is due to the time it takes for the background processes to initialize.

After Effects spawns a process called aeselflink for each CPU you designate under the Memory and Multiprocessing preferences.

I’m very pleased to have read that in the next version of AFX there will be a preference so that leaving multiprocessing on will not affect RAM previews, only rendering.

[Ridley Walker]

The glitch you’re seeing looks like the typical interference intersection of 3D layers on the Z axis. After Effects has problems when multiple 3D layers are in the same Z position, separating them by a few pixels usually solves the issue.

OR

Are you in CS6 and using the Ray Traced Renderer? If so try switching to Classic 3D.

[Ridley Walker]

Just needed a copy of CS4…

[Ridley Walker]

Are the layers 3D?

If so and they are on the same plane try moving the background 1 or 2 pixels back on the Z axis.