[Steve Bentley]

Thanks for the reading material.
The math issue was a carbon based error on my end – forgot to divide by 1024 instead of 1000. So much for metric fixing all conversions.

I run pretty clean and with single apps but have never seen AE using much more than 13gb. (at least on the occassions i’ve checked when I thought it should be) Let me have a read and see if a setting is wrong somewhere.

Thanks

[Steve Bentley]

I just realized there are no keyframes on the outer camera. Is it as simple as making a single keyframe for all the values I need in AE for this camera? This camera does bring in keyframes to AE even though it doesn’t have any so I assumed those keyframes would be that outer camera’s absolute matrix with its parents movements and the target movement all rolled in and in world space.
Yes/No?

[Steve Bentley]

Since when do office chair wheels ever line up with the way you want to move? – or shopping carts for that matter!

Anyway, I haven’t looked at your file yet but if you can have a null be the parent of the chair and that null points in the direction of travel (either through a tag or through xpresso), its pretty straight forward in xpresso to output the H angle the null is on to all the wheels of the chair’s H angle.
You should use the global rotation so that no matter what way the chair inside the null is pointing the wheels will be pointing where the parent null is going.
Having the chair be a child of the object that is being thrown around by forces means you can tweak the chair’s animation to your liking and have the chair spin even while its traveling in a straight line, but the wheels will still be pointing where the null is going. and will counter rotate automatically to the body of the chair.
You may have to change the calculation order of the xpresso vs the tag vs the dynamics, so you may have to make the wheel rotation xpresso priority more than 1 or 2 (you can set it to 100 to be sure if you have other things going on). that way it gets calculated after all the dynamics and the direction tag get done figuring out what they have to do.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Cassius,
Here’s the stripped down file. I want to have some items in AE be in relationship to the included plane.
The animation is between f 440 and f 625 but I want to render this at 60fps so I get twice as many frames (this way I’m not messing with the curves if I instead stretched the keyframes in the time line.)

Its the inner nested cam that I need the absolute keyframes for. I’m also ok with building a heirachy in AE with the separate keyframes of all the players too, but I couldn’t make that work either.

11621_nestcams.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Walter, what i”m about to ask is not about correcting you but more to make sure I’m not missing something. Can you “show your work” on the math for the single frame of 4K? I’m not getting the number you get.

Also, doesn’t the memory for AE include an assumed alpha in the video buffer? so that would be one more channel (and more mb) to take into account.

And finally, while all the propaganda for AE says that it can use all the ram you give it since CS5, I’ve not found that to be the case in the real world. Sure it’s gotten better, but we work on some pretty heavy files here and with 128gb available i’ve never seen AE top out beyond 13gb, and its still not caching everything it could be if it could access more ram. Am I missing something here too? where I could be filling up the ram and being more efficient? And is this different between Mac and PC?

Or are the system tools lying to me about how and where the ram is filling. It would explain the long wait times when you purge the cache.

[Steve Bentley]

You could try trashing the AE prefs file. It will get rebuilt the next time you fire up AE. It sounds like perhaps a color assigned to certain geometry is corrupted and some of that info is in the prefs file.

[Steve Bentley]

I get red boxes regardless if they created new or dragged from the solids folder or even “brought in” from a 3d package.

Dumb question, but are their eyeballs turned off? You can go into the solids settings for each null and turn on or off preview so they do or don’t show when running a caches preview. Do you have handles turned on in the comp’s view options?

I thought there used to be a way to turn them to invisible unless they were selected.

[Steve Bentley]

So its probably that we’ve installed third party codecs in AME to allow this ( I know we’ve added cineon and BMD so an additional H264 isn’t out of the question). It would answer the question as to why we don’t see the problem that others are seeing (our colleagues as well) when trying to do larger or multipass H264s or 265s through AME.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts on this topic (which seems to be at an epidemic level these days), we tend choose either QT Pro itself or FFMPG long before we’ll fire up AME to do a 264 crunch. But that’s purely for ease of use and speed of compress. With the exception of dedicated hardware boards nothing we’ve found beats FFmpg for speed.

But still my advice remains – do the compress AFTER you have output a clean file from AE. I really don’t understand the desire to do it in one pass. It takes longer, plus you don’t get to see the AE output before you compress (it could have issues) and you can’t tweak the compress on the clean master file after the fact because AE is doing it for you. If the initial compression values aren’t good enough you can always crunch it again, which always takes less time than running even just the clean master file out of AE again, let alone re-rendering AND compressing.

Does this make large (even huge) clean master files coming out of AE? You bet, but drives are dirt cheap these days and even a boring vanilla size is now 750gb+. Animation Best is a great QT format to render your clean master in. While technically compressed, it is compressed with run-length encoding, so nothing is lost. A noisy movie will be a similar size (in mb) to a truly uncompressed file, but anything with solids or where elements don’t change that much will be massively smaller. Minute long alpha channels rendered in Animation Best can be less than 500k and will be just as perfect as an equivalent uncompressed monster at over 14 gb.

[Steve Bentley]

Open the file in AI and check under FILE/document color mode. You can just switch it here as well and resave or save as.

[Steve Bentley]

If you want a crash course in Expressions just search for any post in this forum from Dan Ebberts, he is the master at this stuff.