[Scott G]

thanks steve, i wasn’t aware of the bullet upgrade. i’ll test it out asap.

[Scott G]

perhaps the slowness does have something to do with my plugins. i’ve just tried rendering my showreel with nucleo, which is normally a 2hr render. it’d done it in about half an hour. groovy!

pity about my other project though, i was hoping nucleo could help me on that specific project, as rendering 200 stills with camera moves and the grade is going to take a long time at around an hour per still. argh!!!

[Scott G]

just as i suspected, the time run out and nothing happened… it just stayed on 10% forever. stayed for half an hour on “1 second remaining”. i was forced to stop it.

i read a similar thing happened to someone else on the forum. there was no solution posted though…

[Scott G]

it doesn’t seem to be making any great use of my processors either. check out the gif file. processors seems to reach a max of 25%.

https://scott.geersen.com.au/nucleo-sg-01.gif

i don’t understand. so many great reviews… seemed to be the miracle cure for slow renders. 🙁 is there anything i can do?

[Scott G]

thanks steve for your previous help and advice.

i’ve downloaded and installed nucleo to trial, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting my render time at all.
i have a dual 2.4 xeon running winXP with 2gb of ram. the nucleo render popup window is telling me that it’ll take 1hr 20 mins to render this 20sec comp. this is the same time taken when i DON’T use nucleo.

my comp consists of a large tiff file with an unsharp mask, 5 adjustment layers of varying opacities, all of which use a different magic bullet looksuite grade (to get the grade i’m after), a adjust>shadow highlight adjustment layer, a tinderbox lens blur using soft light, and standard after effects film grain. yes, all very render intensive plugins.

does nucleo work well with tinderbox and magic bullet products?

also, my other issue is that even though the time elapsed is ticking up and the est remaining is ticking down, the % complete has sat on 10% for the past 20 mins of this 1hr20min render.

i’ll wait for the render to complete nonetheless, and see if it actually renders without an error, or stays on 10% forever.

[Scott G]

well, this may sound stupid, but they’re identical. but your previous reply seems to indicate that all networked workstations are used – ie, mine AND the spare render box in this case, whereas nucleo would only be maxing out my own.

is there any point to installing x-factor on only one additional box? surely the same result could be achieved by queueing a render with “skip existing frames” on both boxes?

[Scott G]

thanks for the quick and detailed reply!
one more question though: in my particular work setup, there are three full time afx compositors, 1 on a mac, 2 on pcs, and we have a spare box we use for rendering. the spare box is hardly used at all, except for rendering finals or the occasional test.
during the day (when the other two guys are here) would i get greater performance from running gridiron with this spare box, or just nucleo on my own?
obviously gridiron would be better if i’m working late, but that doesn’t happen often, thank goodness.
we have an infrastructure already set up with ethernet and all work residing on central servers / permissions are taken care of already. so setup is not a worry for me, i think i’m tech savvy enough to handle it. 🙂

[Scott G]

oh – i am using 6.5 on a pc. the guy with the mac has never ever experienced this problem before. the other pc guys says he’s had it once or twice in his life.

[Scott G]

Hi Jeff,

Heh, I thought you only lurked on the AE Enhancers forum.

I think I’m going crazy, as I tried the blending mode one again with the lowercase and you’re right, it doesn’t work. Too many hours staring at the screen.

I see now it is listed with a capital in the script guide, I wasn’t paying attention to the 2nd column in the index of properties at the back of the guide, and in the main section of the guide I guess I wasn’t paying attention either.
I assumed that all the properties started with lowercase letters, and over the past few days I got used to typing all these firstword-lowercase names, it didn’t click with me that you had to use the captial when setting as opposed to the lowercase when referring to it.

sheepish,
scott.

[Scott G]

it works if you say
myadd02.trackMatteType = TrackMatteType.ALPHA;
instead of
myadd02.trackMatteType = trackMatteType.ALPHA;

notice how one uses a capital T?

but for blending modes, it works when they’re both lowercase.
that’s inconsistent!

can someone please explain why this inconsistency works and is necessary???????????????????????????????
completely non-intuitive.
ARGH.