[Sam Young]

i used to teach at the academy of art university.
without going into detail, i will say this:
think twice about going there and giving them your money.

i’ve heard good things about SCAD.

but is paying for graduate school worth it?
are employers seeking out motion graphic artists with masters degrees or beefy portfolios? wouldn’t you be better off using the money you would’ve spent on graduate school on simply supporting yourself as you create graphics to put on your reel?

[Sam Young]

use the grayscale movie as a luma matte, not a mask

[Sam Young]

example 1:
nest that background into its own composition. enable time-remapping. apply a loopOut(“cycle”) expression to time-remapping.

example 2:
for a clip that’s already rendered as a movie file, select it in the project window, file>interpret footage, then enable looping

[Sam Young]

working with complex groups of layers in 3d space, specifically.

if i wanted to arrange x number of layers along a spline path in 3d space in AE, i had to come up with a complex javascript. whereas in C4D, all i had to do was click a mouse.

then there was the whole layers-can’t-have-thickness and no-volumetric-lighting limitations in AE that started to bug me.

[Sam Young]

i’m curious what you intend to do. there is only so much that AE can do, even with expressions.

at a certain point, i hit a wall and started teaching myself Cinema 4D.

motionscript.com is about as advanced as it gets.

[Sam Young]

1. without knowing what frame rate you’re using, it’s hard to give a verbose response.

2. AE counts time in H:M:S:F, in feet + frames, or in frames only. if you’re using H:M:S:F, then 59 plus 1 seconds will roll over to 1 minute 0 seconds. there’s no way to make it count time in seconds only.

[Sam Young]

cinema 4d …. Cinema 4d …. CINEMA 4D……

like all other 3d apps, c4d lets you model objects, animate cameras and lights, and render out an image sequence.

from c4d, you can export an after effects project file. in that, all of your c4d camera and light moves are translated to AE cameras and lights that move in the same way. this would allow you to add 3d layers in AE that would move in a way correspondent to c4d’s objects moved in relation to the c4d camera.

plus, c4d is cheaper than maya and way easier to learn than maya.

if you want to use a 3d app to make motion graphics, c4d comes with a module called mograph that allows for making complex clones of objects that can be animated/arranged along splines, and can animate in response to audio.

[Sam Young]

first, turn off multi-processor rendering when doing ram previews. only activate that before doing your final render.

turn on disk caching in your Memory & Cache preferences. my machine has the same specs as yours, and i figured out that setting the Maximum RAM Cache Size below 60% yields the fastest rendering.

[Sam Young]

BTW, Sam…. Maya does indeed do multipass rendering. 🙂

thanks. good to know that.

[Sam Young]

dunno if maya can do multi-pass rendering; doubt it.

but i know that maya cannot export an AE project file with all its camera and light data. C4D can. that alone ought to be a big selling point for you.

as for C4D’s photo-realistic rendering, check out maxon’s reel on their website.

https://www.maxon.net/pages/dyn_files/dyn_htx/htx/sol_home_e.html