[Ridley Walker]

[Tim Drage] “You’re the worst support/tech forum poster I know TBH. “

Tim;

I’m not sure whether you got off to a bad start today, but in Dave’s defence he is a valued member of the Cow Community. Over the years his contributions here have save my bacon many times. He deserves your respect and if he doesn’t respond to your liking you’re welcome to ignore it.

TBH your post, while not lacking in detail, was a bit of a ramble and difficult to decipher.

I hope you realize that other every poster here is a user like yourself, other than Todd Kopriva, no one has a direct affiliation with Adobe or gets paid to post on the forum.

[Ridley Walker]

The lifespan is is calculated in frames, there is a ‘feature” that is confusing: the bubble size will affect how far the bubble travels over its life.

Smaller bubbles travel further. Try adjusting the production rate and the bubble size.

I’m assuming you’re *not* using a Flow Map to restrict where the bubbles travel.

[Ridley Walker]

It would be helpful to know the type of footage (avi, mov, mts etc) and whether it is a compressed file (mpg, h.264, HDV) etc.

Without know the particulars, I suspect that you may be working with a source file with a long GOP. Since this type of footage has no actual frames and must be reconstituted in After Effects, applying frame blending or reducing the speed of the footage will produce unpredictable results like those you describe.

If this is the case, render out the original footage in an uncompressed format, import the uncompressed file into After Effects, add this to a new Comp adjust the speed/frame blending as desired, then render that.

[Ridley Walker]

As usual Walter provides a thorough, thoughtful response, to which I’d just add one comment. The bottlenecks that occur depend entirely on the nature of the work you’re doing.

If you’re reading and writing large files then disk i/o is important, using lots of effects or expressions then CPU speed is paramount, and of course both Vishesh and Walter mentioned Ray-tracing and other processes that take advantage of the GPU.

[Ridley Walker]

You can use any of the keying tools to make the white transparent. Just use the eyedropper in the keying effects control panel to pick white as your key color.

Linear Color Key should work if the background is pure white, if not use Keylight and if necessary a Matte Choker.

[Ridley Walker]

I’m in agreement with Dave and Vishesh, RAM is more important than video cards, however for Ray Tracing the video card makes an enormous difference.

I’ve just upgraded to a GTX 570 and love it.

See uan Salvo and Danny Princz’s AE/GPU benchmarks
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1019643#1019643

[Ridley Walker]

Since a Null’s purpose is to be a parent to another layer, whether the layer visibility switch is on or off won’t affect its function, just click the eyeball to turn it off.

Not possible with cameras however.

[Ridley Walker]

This is a divide by zero error, your slider has a value of 0 you need to account for that in the script so the value is never 0 and will not produce the error.

[Ridley Walker]

A better approach is to use Expression Controls which are linked to the variable values in the expression.

A simple example:

A Null object with an Expression Control slider named “Offset”.

Two layers with a position expression that reads:

offset = thisComp.layer(“Control”).effect(“Offset”)(“Slider”);
[transform.position[0],transform.position[1]+offset]

Changing the value of the slider affects both layers.

Here is an example: 5200_expressioncontrol.aep.zip

[Ridley Walker]

If I understand you correctly, one approach is the following.

Create a Master Composition which is 3 times wider than the size you need for the individual rendered screens.

Create Left, Middle and Right Comps at the size you need to render for each screen.

Place the Master in each of the above Comps by dragging the Master from the Project pane into the Timeline, and position accordingly. Hold down the Shift Key as you move the Master in the Left and Right Comps to snap it to the edges of the screen.

Left has the left edge of the Master as its left edge.

Right has the right edge of the Master as its right edge.

Middle has the Master placed in it with no position adjustment.

Render Left, Middle and Right Comps.