[Steve Drew]

Thanks heaps Joseph. Unfortunately, this is definitely one of the Cheap and Quick selctions… and no MoCo rig is available.

I’m thinking of getting the director to shoot this in a series of plate shots – background only, then glass only, then glass with hand placing the straw etc… just so I’m somewhat covered. Once I separate the straw from the background I’m probably going to animate a ‘reshape’ effect to get the move right… then it’s probably half a day of jiggling so it doesn’t look too crap.

I’ve also just been told final resolution will be MPEG1, so I might be able to get away with a bit more than I had thought! 😉

Cheers,
Steve.

[Steve Drew]

Two things I use to speed things up is reducing the length of your layer by splitting your layer up into seperate shots, or smaller clips etc. and painting/cloning those.
The other thing is to do a PURGE ALL every few minutes.

Hope this helps!

[Steve Drew]

Great idea Peter! Thanks.

Dave – only 720×576 – i’m doing one of those 3D pan/zoom/track animations that is moving around a giant pic.

But I figured a work around out for myself – I was rendering in 32bit (why not eh?) and it was failing, but the render was fine at 8bit & 16bit. Unfortunately I really wanted the Glow effect to be reproduced in 32bit as it’s much nicer that way. I was able to reduce my giant source file down in Photoshop a couple of thousand pixels without any noticable quality loss in AE. That must have taken the render under AE’s threshold as it rendered fine in the end, and at 32bit. 🙂

Thanks for your help guys.
Steve.

[Steve Drew]

oh – one extra note – it’s failing when using AE7’s standard renderer, and also with Nucleo’s renderer.

Cheers,
Steve.

[Steve Drew]

Really Aharon? Damn… I’ve just ‘cartoonerated’ stacks of pics manually in photoshop!

What I did was apply a Surface Blur and toggle the properties to smooth out as much “fill” detail as possible, but leaving the edges. Then I applied the Cutout and Poster Edges filters (in that order), and adjusted properties to get the particular level of detail you need. Then I’d paint in or out certain details, like cleaning up the eyes & teeth etc, works well.

(be on the lookout for the next series of Surfing the Menu, if you get it wherever you are)

Cheers,
Steve

[Steve Drew]

Really Aharon? Damn… I’ve just ‘cartoonerated’ stacks of pics manually in photoshop!

What I did was apply a Surface Blur and toggle the properties to smooth out as much “fill” detail as possible, but leaving the edges. Then I applied the Cutout and Poster Edges filters (in that order), and adjusted properties to get the particular level of detail you need. Then I’d paint in or out certain details, like cleaning up the eyes & teeth etc, works well.

(be on the lookout for the next series of Surfing the Menu, if you get it wherever you are)

Cheers,
Steve

[Steve Drew]

Hi – did you find any resolution to this?

A similar issue has been happening to me for a while – renders will skip processing an effect, or a layer, or a transform property etc for a single frame but everything’s fine in the composition.

If I purge-all the dodgy frames will render fine, but then I get dodgy frames somewhere else in the sequence…. very annoying!

Weird that no-one else is reporting it?!

[Steve Drew]

I’ve had the same issue, regarding the darkening of the picture upon import back to Final Cut. It looks like a gamma shift is being introduced when AE (in my case, AE 6.5) renders it. I don’t know why it’s doing that though…

What’s more, checking the properties of the re-imported clip, it’s resolution and compressor type is correct for HDV, but it reports the Data Rate is 15.5MB/s, as opposed to HDV’s 3.7. Bizarre – both a natively captured HDV file, and my HDV rendered file play back in the FCP timeline no problem, but weird that it’s a bigger file size…?

[Steve Drew]

One key difference is that they are completely different letters. NTSC also has one additional letter to PAL, however only PAL is pronounceable as a word in it’s own right. NTSC will always be, unfortunately, high and dry when it comes to keeping company with good letters, especially vowels.

Hope this helps!

[Steve Drew]

I agree Andy,
It’s the most amazing thing about Apple bugs – their irony.
They make incredibly powerful software, easy to use, at the forefront of technology blah blah blah… but!
Their Chroma/Luma level checking software (range check) displays incorrect Chroma/Luma values when turned on.
Their Media Manager takes any reversed clips and gives them a random speed and a duration of 1 frame, regardless of how long the master clip was.
Their 10bit timelines, used for highly accurate colour rendering actually renders digital green blemishes all over the screen when used in combination with a couple of (supported) plugins.
And only a year or so ago Final Cut’s EDL generation created useless EDLs if you had any transitions in the edit…

Don’t get me wrong, I love em, and this isn’t just a flaming session – but seriously… the irony baffles me…