[Shawn Marshall]

Update:

It appears that if I manually set the ProRes 4444 codec to Millions of Colors+ in my FCP sequence I can export a reference movie. But it still would be nice if I didn’t have to go through those extra steps to make it work as it used to.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the quick reply. I figured sliders and my friend the pick whip would serve me well, and they did. I never noticed the Copy Expression Only command. That should really come in handy in the future.

Cheers.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi Walter:

Thanks for taking the time to reply, I appreciate it.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there’s no magic “Make proxy stills of every selected item and link them to their original footage” button. I’d have to render out a frame of each piece of video and then link those stills as proxies. At some point the effort required to go through such a workaround will outweigh the time it takes to just let the RAM preview churn through all the frames of moving video. With a Freeze Frame I can select all 20 layers at once and freeze them all. This only takes a few seconds. I can then just as quickly unfreeze them all when I’m ready to use the moving video.

It’s not like every project I do involves flying around a bunch of video boxes, but for those handful of projects we get each year requiring that, the Wireframe Preview really came in handy.

Cheers.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the reply, Michael. I will sometimes parent multiple elements to nulls to add a drift to all of them. There might be times when doing that for individual items would be efficient, so I’ll play around with that approach, too.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Thanks for the reply, Darby.

I sometimes have made these adjustments by dragging the handles on the keyframes. If I zoom in close and enable snapping I can get the motion I want fairly quickly. That would save me the step of opening up the Keyframe Velocity dialog box and entering numbers.

I was hoping there was a way I could do this without opening the Graph Editor at all. I really don’t like the Graph Editor. I remember it was touted as a way to adjust the velocity curves of multiple layers spread over the timeline simultaneously, but I don’t think I’ve EVER had to do that since Adobe switched over to the graph editor six or seven years ago. I much preferred the old method where you could twirl down the velocity curve for a particular layer within the timeline, without having to switch to a different interface (that counts against your undos.) It seems like Adobe could have at least left in that capability while adding the Graph Editor option on top of that.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the quick replies, I appreciate it.

Dave, your method does result in nice linear motion in the middle, but there are little blips at those two eased keyframes because the incoming velocity is 0 and the outgoing velocity is 237 (and vice-versa). The faster the text is drifting the more apparent the hitch becomes. It’s also more apparent on text moving left or right. It’s much harder to see the hitch if I use your approach on text moving along the z axis.

Cassius, I’ll try to remember to use Shift-F3 more. The rest of the process is still a bit of a hassle, though.

Thanks again.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

You might want to look at the Cinebench scores for the iMacs vs. the Mac Pros. For raw rendering power you’ll probably see appreciably faster renders as you throw more cores at it. In general, 8 cores will be faster than 4, and 12 cores will be faster than 8. But you’ll be paying for those cores.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics.

[Shawn Marshall]

I’ll try to remember that shortcut. I do use Shift-F4 a lot to bring up the parenting options.

Another efficiency nit. I’ve never understood why invoking the Graph Editor counts as an Undo-at least through CS5 (don’t know about CS5.5). Why does that count as a “Composition Switch”? Just turning the Graph Editor on or off doesn’t change anything in the composition.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi Walter:

Thanks for the replies; I appreciate it. The proxy idea is one I’d considered, and I’ll play around with that approach next time this issue comes up.

Maybe it’s just that the nature of our work (which is mainly corporate stuff that often relies on energetic motion) that makes me more sensitive to the removal of wireframe previews than most other users who focus more on effects and compositing.

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using After Effects since around 1996 or 1997. It’s the foundation of our business. So to me, it’s weird to have (what I thought was) a fundamental functionality excised from the program in CS5 and not replaced with something better. I felt the same way when they forced the graph editor on us and removed the ability to adjust the keyframe velocities within the main timeline (with each layer.) Having to open and close the graph editor every time I want to adjust a velocity curve negatively impacts my efficiency.

Thanks again.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Shawn Marshall]

Todd:

I wasn’t under the impression that as a registered user of this forum there was a limit to how many times I could post about an issue that negatively impacted my workflow. So what if I’ve posted about this issue three times? The only responses I’ve received are from you, and I feel like you’re trying to paint me as some sort of outlier disgruntled crackpot in your latest reply. “We asked HUNDREDS of people, and you’re the ONLY ONE who misses the feature, and you’ve posted about it THREE TIMES.”

OMG. Avert your eyes from my freakishness.

With this latest post I was hoping to hear from users who use the software professionally on a daily basis that don’t work for Adobe. If I’m the lone voice in the wilderness on this, so be it, but I’d like to hear that from a few of those users.

After reading through the Adobe AE Forum thread about the 2.15 GB QT limit when rendering to network drives in CS5, a problem first reported almost a year ago and yet is still unresolved in AE CS5.5, I don’t think my “trust, but verify” policy towards Adobe and After Effects is unwarranted.

Thank you.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics