[Spencer Tweed]

Good call Dave it was an XDcam, though the DP told me she was shooting it 4-4-2.

I knew that the lighting would be key in this shot, so worked with both of the gaffers very closely. I’ll forward your message to ’em!

– Spencer

PS

I’d love to take them out for beers but it’ll have to be a few years – I’m 17.

[Spencer Tweed]

Allright, I finally put up a sample! Check out the link in the thread.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

sorry, forgot to put the link up!

https://f1.creativecow.net/1548/reflections-key-final-shot?uploaded=file

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Allright, here is the shot with a little breakdown! I got okay to post it, as long as you can’t see the actor’s faces – so I thought it would be all too fitting to do a mosaic.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Yeesh. I hate moire!

I’d need a little more info to help you out. For example, is the moire coming from After Effects or the medium it was loaded onto? Was this a defect in the camera itself? If you are down-sizing the footage in AE you will sometimes get moire.

First nail down where the problem is entered it, and then you can find the solution (or ask).

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

I’ll be posting a few frames in the next hour or so! I think it turned out well, the only problem is that there is quite a bit of spill in the reflections, but I just roto’d an adjustment layer and manually corrected that.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

I did a test run before we went ahead and shot it. The reflections were extremely bright – not like a car window or something – due to the low angle of the camera (about eye level). This makes it pretty easy for me to key.

In the end I plan to roto out the piece of glass (including the reflections, minus the hands) and then key this separately. This way I can have a finer matte, and some more control over how the reflections look. Then I can dim them, blur them, etc.

So far I have seen 2 problems. 1: it is a little tricky to key with the shadows and such also being cast on the table. 2: because this is a little more sensitive there was a little more grain and whatnot in the test I did. But this should all be handleable.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

[Spencer Tweed] “In CS5 I see performance boosts of up to 4x from my not-too-shabby ATI Radeon to an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800.”

I am assuming you are talking about Premiere Pro here — After Effects does not render on the GPU.

There are a handful of GPU-accelerated effects, but in a network render, everything should be rendered on a CPU unless the machines are completely homogenous. OpenGL rendering should never be used (on a render farm or on a workstation).

You are right, if you are just rendering you might not notice a difference. It is subject to test though, I don’t believe that After Effects ONLY uses CPU. This may be true for most 3D apps, but I believe it is a little different in AE. I definitely notice a difference inside of AE itself when ram previewing, etc (and I don’t use open GL). Additionally all of my render nodes were configured for 3DS Max (AKA, no GPU whatsoever) and honestly suck at rendering AE despite their quad-core CPUs. They are admittedly old though…

The reason I don’t use render multiple frames is that it tends to crash AE and slow down performance, despite the render boost. Specially if you cap out the RAM, it can start cashing to the disk and kill render speeds (4 core CPU = 4 cores trying to pull files off of your HDD).

Under the right conditions I am sure that it is a good ideal, but it has only been trouble for me.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Yo Scott,

Sounds like you have several questions here. To the first (hardware) definitely go with one of the nicer NVIDIA graphics cards if you can. In CS5 I see performance boosts of up to 4x from my not-too-shabby ATI Radeon to an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. That said, the whole point of a render farm is that you can take tens of crappy computers and make use out of them. I stick to quality over quantity though, take this from experience.

RAM is also something to think about. If you never plan to go 64bit (CS5 and above) then you will not use more than 3g of RAM unless you render multiple frames simultaneously (which I personally don’t suggest). However if you do plan to go to CS5 and above, get all of the RAM you can get. The more the better; Adobe suggests 8g and up (12 should be plenty).

Lastly I suggest having a fast network connection – fiber optics is best (seriously). The slowest thing about net-rendering in After Effects is that when you send a job to render you have to duplicate all of the footage items onto your network (even if they are already there), and then these are pulled by each machine. If you have a comp that has a few minutes of HD video this can take quite a while.

Now for your next question:
would it be better to use AE’s network rendering feature instead of each machine in our render farm handling a single project on it’s own?

You should do a bit more research. There are 2 ways of net-rendering in AE. 1: you send a project to the farm and each machine takes a separate frame and renders out a sequence. 2: you send a project to the farm and each computer renders an item in the render queue.

I usually choose option 1 if I have a few big projects, and option 2 if I have a million little projects. Get it?

Let me know if you have any more questions, but definitely refer to the After Effects manual as I think you should look at what exactly net-rendering IS in After Effects.

Hope this helps,
– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

I’m sorry, I don’t think I can (due to legal). It’s pretty simple to set up though, just make sure that your glass is only reflecting green and the actors (we had a 8-10 foot high screen 6 feet behind them).

– Spencer