Scott Frizzle
Forum Replies Created
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It seems Motion is taking advantage of OSX’s partial 64 bit capability here to access more memory. I agree with Bjorn; if this were a true 64 bit app, Apple would be telling everyone and their brother about it.
Considering Maxon’s stellar (as far as I’m concerned) track record concerning Mac support, it seems logical that if it were reasonably easy to make a Mac 64 bit version of Cinema, they’d do it. You can’t knock them for not creating a version of Cinema to take advantage of OSX’s partial 64 bit support when they could simply wait for Apple to add full 64 bit support. Let’s face it; Apple wants us all to think that Tiger is a full 64 bit OS, but it’s not there yet. When it’s there, the apps will come.
I’m as disappointed as anyone about this situation, since I have this G5 which is 64 bit capable, but I’ve been waiting for a year and a half for the OS to catch up to the hardware in this area. Looks like I’ll be waiting a while longer… ; )
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No Mac love, but it’s not Maxon’s fault. This from Apple’s site:
“It is important to note that in Tiger, the support for 64-bit programming does not extend throughout the entire set of APIs available on Mac OS X. Most notably, the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks are not ready for 64-bit programming. In practical terms, this means that the “heavy lifting” of an application that needs 64-bit support can be done by a background process which communicates with a front-end 32-bit GUI process via a variety of mechanisms including IPC and shared memory.”
As Maxon mentions on their site, only command line applications can run in 64 bit mode. This is disappointing as a G5/Tiger user. I didn’t realize Apple only had “sort of 64 bit” support.
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Bill, I think you should post your project if that’s possible (I know this can be tough as far as clients are concerned.) I’d be happy to take a look at it and I’m sure several others would as well.
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One of the most important things that you can do on big, render intensive projects is to do an “optimization pass” before the final render. This is where you go through and scrutinize each layer of the project and see what can be made more efficient for the render. As Steve said, large image/ footage files can be a real render hog, especially if they have a lot of effects on them or if they are 3d layers with motion blur turned on. If you have large files like this, make sure you actually need them to be that big. Often I’ll create images at a large size just in case, but in the final design they end up taking up a small amount of space somewhere in the background of the animation. This would be a case where you would want to replace those big files with a smaller version. Also, check to see if you have a lot of layers with the same effect applied to them, for instance, 10 background layers all with a Gaussian blur applied to them. You could get rid of all the individual blurs and either precomp those layers and apply a single Gaussian blur, or use an adjustment layer to do the same. I realize this is too late now, but as you’re buliding the file it helps to pre render the things that you don’t think are going to change later on. For instance, if you have a background layer with 12 filters on it that’s killing your render time, pre render it and bring it back in as footage so save time as you are working.
Those are just a few suggestions, but I’m sure you’ll come up with more if you really dig into your file. There’s almost always a way to achieve the same effect with a more efficient render.
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Personally I think you should build render times invisibly into your rate/ bids. An hourly rate for rendering time can get you into some problems with pricing integrity, among other things. For instance, an hourly charge for rendering rewards you for using slower machines to render on. Also, if you’re bidding against someone who has no line item on their bid for rendering time, you could be at a disadvantage both from the pricing perspective and from a perception perspective.
For similar reasons this is why I no not use an hourly charge for my services. It makes no sense in a creative business. If NBC calls you tomorrow and wants you to design them a new logo to replace the peacock, and you have your best design day ever and create something they love in 2 hours, are you going to send them a bill for $150 and call it a day? Hell no! Hourly rates reward people for being slow and often don’t take into account the value of creative or the value of what’s being delivered. You should be able to adjust your bid independently of an hourly rate taking into account who you’re working for and what you’re delivering. Hourly rates make more sense in an edit suite where you can expect a somewhat more consistent output of work per hour, but in design things are not so reliable.
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Files with a lot of keyframes can screw up the import process for sure. Since your file is 30 seconds long, there’s lots of keyframe data in there. If adjusting your memory settings doesn’t help, try deleting the lights from your C4d file before exporting. If you still have issues, try exporting the camera data in short segments; say, 10 seconds each, and then paste the keyframes back together in AE. I’ve had to do this before on longer projects; it’s a minor hassle, but it was the only way to get things to work.
Good luck!
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Jeff, thanks for the response. I’ve experimented with using stock FBX files, which seems to work well enough, although the process of applying the motion to an existing character in Cinema seems pretty darned tedious. The motion comes through fine, but unless I’m missing something, you have to manually match each piece of the existing character to the FBX bone structure, which takes a while, and even then if you don’t have the positioning and scaling exactly right, everything is off. I didn’t know if there was a simpler way to get a basic moving character into Cinema, or an easy way to apply existing motion to a Cinema character.
The motion may be simple enough for me to do manually, but I want to exhaust the motion capture option first before doing all that keyframing.
Thanks for your help!
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David,
I’m not sure if this truly fits your needs, but I’ve had great luck with Iomega’s REV drive. The disks cost $100 each, but they hold 35 gig each (90gig if you use compression). They’re great for me, because I have a completely tapeless system now, so I back up every single asset to disk. It’s nice to be able to call up a year old project and have all the files right there, no capturing or reconnecting necessary. The REV drive is pretty fast (much better than CD or DVD) and seems very reliable. Time will tell, but this is Iomega’s answer to the tape backup system, so hopefully they’ve built in some reliability. The moving parts are on the drive and not the disks (cartridges) themselves, so hopefully that helps. I have had great results so far after about 6 months of use.
As far as software goes, I have used Retrospect, but now I just do manual archives. Retrospect seemed to work fine with the REV system though.