[Stephen Norrington]

Hi Joel,

I, too, am handling a VFX heavy feature film on Premiere Pro and I’ve found it most efficient to create custom low-rez edit media first, use that for the cut then conform the final manually after the fact.

It may sound a bit old-school but my experience with all the various linking options of the Adobe suite has been less than stellar. Lacking a backroom crew to wrangle all the problems, I’ve successfully worked around by going super-simple. The time taken with edit media prep and conform is way less than the time taken to wrangle a full-rez import>edit>output pipeline.

My machine is i7 24gb Win 7 + powerful graphics card. The movie is 4.5k 2.09:1 format (4500px x 2148px – 4k 2.35:1 oversized to allow for post-repo and filter artifacts around the edges) – here’s my workflow:

– Place all the available material for each scene in an After Effects project that has previously been set up as a template to overlay a frame counter (numbers effect) start to finish.

– Render out 1k edit media (1000px x 477px 2.09:1) in Quicktime H.264 format (Spatial Quality 75) and use that to cut with.

– When the scene is locked, manually conform a master for delivery-rendering by adding a copy of the locked 1k cut (scaled up) to a copy of the After Effects 4.5k project and eyematching each edit.

Old school, for sure 🙂 It avoids “The Attack Of The Time Vampires” ie: Premiere Pro stuttering on the 4.5k material, metadata, Adobe Bridge and Dynamic Link etc. For me, working alone, this method makes things go a lot faster in the long run. Perhaps it will also have some merit for your task.

Cheers,
Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Hi Gerald,

Your system is approximately comparable to mine. I’ve experienced the slow-mo crash-type situation you’re describing and it has almost always been due to source layers in my comp being too large for AE+MySystem to handle.

From your description your problem sounds like your puppet’s source layers are very large and/or the DUIK aspect is computationally onerous.

I have no experience with DUIK so can’t offer thoughts there. However, no matter how many expressions, keyframes and layers you have, AE generally has no problem dealing with a torrent of that kind of “infra-structure” data stuff.

The problem I used to run into was making my source images way too large (for max resolution and detail) – by “too large” I mean 6k x 6k, 8k x 8k, 15k x 15k etc. – and then having loads of those layers stacked to make a puppet. I had to rethink my approach after a particularly gnarly 85 hour render :-0

My solution has been to do some tests to determine the minimum size source image I can get away with for a particular project and make the puppet just a bit bigger than that.

Example: I had a puppet built from fifty 6k x 6k layers being used in a 4.5K (4500px x 2148px) comp. AE+MySystem kept crashing, I finally managed to render something but it took the aforementioned 85 hrs. After doing some tests I determined that the puppet only needed to be 2k x 2k (the visual result in the 4.5K frame was identical) – I rebuilt the puppet at that size and the problem went away, to the extent that I was able to work on subsequent shots on my cheap Lenovo laptop.

I hate to say it, but if you’ve got your puppet made from huge layers, retaining the build whilst downsizing the layers will be tricky because the anchor points may go screwy if you change the source layer sizes – you might be able to sidestep this by downsizing the layers by an exact multiple (200%, 300% etc.) then scaling them back up in AE the same amount.

If your source layers are huge a workaround could be to create a set of proxy source layers from the full-size layers (at the minimum size you can live with re: resolution and detail) and use the proxies all the time, both for working on the comp and rendering.

If your layers are not huge I’m not sure what the problem might be. Perhaps something to do computational load caused by DUIK or perhaps you have motion blur turned on – that’s often a “show-killer”.

As far as the expressions go, if you copy>paste your layers from your imported build project to your main comp (one by one, I’d suggest, so you don’t bamboozle AE) there may be no way around brute-force rewriting them to suit the new layer configuration. It’s a bit of a chore but pays off in the end.

If I have understood your setup correctly, your keyframed walk-cycle animation should copy>paste no problem along with the layers you copy>paste.

Summary: if your puppet’s layers are huge consider creating small proxies so AE+YourSystem can cope – copy your puppet’s layers and their attendant walk-cycle animations and expressions from the imported build project to your main comp one by one using copy>paste – rewrite the expressions on the copied layers to suit their new arrangement in the main comp.

Hope this helps. Sorry I can’t opine re: DUIK. I do know that DUIK creates complex hierarchies of layers (via expressions and parenting I believe) which may get screwed up if any of them are rearranged after the fact. But the slowdown and screen flashes you describe sound very much like AE+YourSystem struggling to deal with huge source files.

Best
Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Yeah, folder grouping a la Photoshop would be fantastic – my visual workaround is to separate layer groups by inserting turned-off nulls between them and naming the nulls with hyphen-strings ie: “- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -“.

The color labels are handy too but I find they get mixed up when moving a project from one machine to another – is there some arcane way of copying label preferences (and composition presets) from one instance of AE to another?

Best,
Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Hi Gerald,

I don’t have any suggestions for your particular problem but I’ve been doing a lot of 2.5D puppet animation in AE CS5 recently and I’ve found that precomping puppets in general is a bad idea.

This is because animation done in the precomp does not update in real time in the main comp – each adjustment to the animation only updates in the main comp when you release the mouse – making it next to impossible to artfully animate the character relative to objects in the main scene and from the camera’s POV.

I’ve had much better luck placing all the component layers of the puppet directly in the main comp. The main comp sometimes gets a bit heavy but, so long as all layers are turned off except the minimum needed to effectively animate the shot, it’s eminently doable.

Another reason for avoiding precomps with puppets is that the precomp math sometimes causes the layers of the puppet to appear behind objects when they should be in front.

Another gotcha-avoiding trick is making sure that, if you do elect to precomp your puppet and animate it from within the precomp, the precomp’s dimensions are large enough that the puppet’s appendages don’t stray outside the precomp’s boundaries when you animate ie: if the precomp is not wide enough for the puppet to extend its arms fully when leaning fully from one side to the other the arms will be cut off in the main comp. Resizing the precomp after-the-fact is painful because all the puppet layers in the precomp take their anchor points from the precomp’s dimensions so changing it after you have built your puppet will cause all the layers to jump to the wrong positions relative to each other.

Summary: in a dedicated build project create a puppet in a comp that has the exact same dimensions as the main comp, import that project into the main project and copy the layers from the build project’s comp directly to the main comp.

One other thing: I’ve not been able to find a way to safely delete the imported build project described above from the main project after I’ve copied layers from the imported build project’s comp to the main project’s comp. Even after doing a CollectFiles and a ReduceProject deleting the imported build project from the main project tends to delete the puppet’s layers in the main project’s comp.

Best,

Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Thanks for the thoughts, I was confused by the elements I have because they are rather inconsistent (green screen color variations and the grading on the photographed content changes shot to shot) but seeing how my material “breaks down” a bit when color-corrected first then keyed I’m gonna do what you do: key first then use per-element CCs, then adjustment layers for overall shot CCs – cheers 🙂

Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Thanks for the speedy response. I’ll create a master reference grade and use that as a guide for grading all the elements after they’ve been keyed. Nice one, appreciated.

Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Hi there,

I’m not an expert with keying by any means but I’ve had good results rotoing 4K for downsizing as follows:

– Create a 4K comp with the element to be rotoed.

– Bring the 2K BG into the 4K comp and scale it up to the 4K frame.

– Do the roto on the 4K, paying attention to how the edge looks over the scaled-up 2K.

– When you’re happy, render out the rotoed 4K with an alpha, bring it into the 2K comp and scale it down to fit.

Doing it this way has given me some very nice clean comps that take account of the interplay between BG and FG. However, when the rotoed 4K render gets scaled down the edges get sharper so that might not be what you want – in that case, scaling the 4K down in a 2K comp might be your best bet – either way, I’ve always found rotoing over a relevant BG plate (so you can see what’s going on with the edge feathers and moblur etc.) is the way to go.

Best
Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production

[Stephen Norrington]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for the response. I think my post was rather opaque. What I’ve been trying to do is move (as an example) Freeform’s area of influence as if it were a layer or a solid – as a single overall “patch of distortion”.

The idea is to set up a non-animating 2D distortion of a content layer using Freeform or Mesh Warp or whathaveyou and then animate (by way of track data) the entire distorted mesh as a single unchanging unit across the content layer (which needs to stay stationary), applying the static 2D distortion as a motion-tracked patch – kind of like a custom lensing effect

Perhaps there’s a plug-in that will do this?

If you’re interested, further details are below the jump:

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Simple approaches I’ve tried fail because the distort effects, by default, seem to take their area of influence to be the boundaries of the 2D layer they’re applied to.

The “intuitive” solution was to apply Freeform to an adjustment layer and move that around. But, in fact, the influence of the effect stays centered in the composition, even when the adjustment layer is moved.

I tested your suggestion and got versions of the same result: Freeform’s mesh on a null, expression-controlled by that null’s XY properties, moves as required but has no effect on the content layer below, Freeform’s mesh on an adjustment layer controlled by the null’s XY properties affects the content layer below but “drags” the layer wholesale, in effect doing a layer-sized XY transform, rather than a passing distort.

I came up with the following inelegant workaround but would love to find something better:

– stabilize the hero content,

– enlarge the composition to reveal all of the stabilized hero,

– XY-repo the stab.’d hero so the centre of stab. is at the center of the comp,

– apply Freeform via an adjustment layer,

– create the desired deform,

– precomp the stab.’d hero and Freeformed adjLayer,

– use the stab. track data (inverted) on the precomp to cancel out the stab.,

– resize the comp to match the dimensions of the original hero.

Inelegant, as I mentioned 🙂

Thanks, best,
Stephen Norrington

Artproject Independent Production