[Sébastien Périer]

BM Intensity pro is nice as long as you are in the prosumer world. It’s biggest flaw is not having SDI inputs, which is kinda mandatory for professional work (if you are about to work with Beta tape recorder for exemple).

I couldn’t agree more with Dave with the external raid. Raid 0 allows you faster data rate, and a 3 to 4 disk array is mendatory for uncompressed HD capture. 4 disks of 500gb costs nothing nowadays. I’ve built up a 4disk array in my desktop PC with a P5B Deluxe motherboard thanks to her 7 sata controllers.

If you have budget an external raid array supporting raid 5, it is even better. Raid 5 is the combination of Raid 0 and Raid 1. As we’ve seen Raid 0 allows faster data rate, but if 1 disk of your array goes south, you loose everything. Raid 1 arrays mirror your data. If you have 2 500Gb disks, you will only have access to 500Gb, the other disk will be a carbon copy of the first one.

So Raid 5 is best of both world, allowing stripping for faster data rate and mirroring for security.

And for your graphic card, if I assume that you won’t do heavy 3D, i guess a high end 1gb video card for gaming will be enough (avoid the x2 series).

[Sébastien Périer]

Well, it obviously a ram problem, but with 2gb of ram, and Vista 32, i still manage to work with HD footage, so your SD should not be a problem.

If you have multi processing on, deactivate it. On my Laptop configuration, i have 1,2gb of ram for after, 0,25 for the rest, and multiprocessing off. I can even deal with 4k footage without any problem.

When you launch after, be sure to close any other greedy app, such as Photoshop, Premiere, Word, …

In low memory configuration, multi-tasking with heavy program can mess up things.

Tell me if it worked for you.

[Sébastien Périer]

What version of AE are you running ? Have you tried to work at half or quarter resolution (drop down menu just under the preview area).

Also, how much ram have you allowed After to access (via the edit > preferences > memory).

Last but not least: PC or Mac, and which OS ?

[Sébastien Périer]

Well, AE CS4 is a 32bit app, so it can use at most 4GIG per process (and 1 process per cpu/core).

If you want your 8Gigs used by After, go to “Preferences > Memory management” and turn on multiprocessing.

AE will let you configure on much ram you want tu use on how much core/cpu you want.

But remember, as it’s a 32Bit app, it will only be able to use up to 4gig of not contiguous memory, so you’ll still have to be carefull with the “buffer memory error” when dealing with very large footage (large == high resolution)

[Sébastien Périer]

Well:

A presset is just a pre-established setup for an effect. It does not create anything, it just sets parameters for an effect.

Exemple: You have a “rain” presset for the effect Particule World, which allows you to easily add a particule rain without creating it from scratch (even if you can create it from scratch. pressets are just time savers).

A plugin is a suite of effects, that was not developped by adobe, but by third parties developpers. A plugin can even come with presset for its effects.

Exemple: Trapcode shine is a plugin that adds a lighting effect, and it comes with several pressets for it (fire light, blue light, ….)

[Sébastien Périer]

Have you tried to randomize the random with seedRandom(index,true)

You can try to assign “index” (it’s the value that changes the random) as the actual index of the target layer, so each layer will have a random seed different, thus having different random values.

[Sébastien Périer]

Thanks for the plug-in tips, i’ll dig into that.

Maybe a Third Party Camera plug-in could also be a good thing, as for exemple, if i do a backward movement with a camera while zooming in (to create that weird background deformation), AE cams seems to distort nothing.

[Sébastien Périer]

What exactly are you trying to do?

I’m trying to recreate a “personnal” DOF to be able to appy effets on it. To be more precise, for a project i’m working on, i would like to use another way to illustrate DOF than blur, but for that i have to create my self the DOF “data” (the focal) so after that, i can apply my “custom” DOF effet.

[Sébastien Périer]

I forgot to say that this Grayscale version of a nested comp should be used as an matte for an adjustement layer.

[Sébastien Périer]

That’s wonderfull Dan,

it’s working great. Best of all, i’ve understood most of the code, so bad my math skills are not really high.

Anyway, thats perfect, and for even more control, i’ve added a “Manual” switch so the animators can choose whatever layer they want visible.

Thanks again,

Seb