[Steve Roberts]

CC Mr. Mercury? It comes on the 6.5 CD. Failing that, you could search the COW for, er, “blood”.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

AE 6.5 dropped the ability to use PS filters. Sorry, you’ll need to use an older version of AE, but I wouldn’t recommend it, since doing that is a bit of a dead end.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

How’s your troubleshooting going?

– find out what the erroneous projects have in common
– remove/change/disable different elements (footage, effects, etc.) from the AE projects to see if anything changes
– copy/save your pref files somewhere else, then delete them and relaunch AE

Let us know …
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

It should be under “window”, visible when you have more than one 3D layer selected.

… I believe it was a separate install from the AE CD.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Most presets are just saved effect settings and keyframes. They were called “favorites” pre-6.5.

Try copying everything from your presets folder and load onto the 6.0 machine, into any folder. Try to apply a favorite (effect>apply favorite, if I recall) by navigating to the folder and picking one of your presets. If it doesn’t work, it could be that you don’t have the effect or that you have an older effect in 6.0. Also, text presets created in 6.5 may not work in 6.0.

Give it a go,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

The CC effects are a separate install on the AE CD.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Ah — constant bitrate with DV. Yep, you’re right. Sorry for the misleading bit o’ advice. Shows how much I use DV. 🙂

You can view all video files without changing them, because you’re actually just uncompressing them. You don’t recompress them when you stop viewing them. 🙂 I’m assuming that’s what you mean by pack/unpack … otherwise you’re talking about rendering and recompressing, which will degrade any video, some less than others, but DV degrades a fair bit.

Regarding recompression, whenever you take a video source and render a new video file from that source (either in AE or in an NLE by adding effects or transitions) you are degrading the file by recompressing. AE always renders, so it always recompresses.

On the other hand, in your NLE, when making a cuts-only video, you are just taking parts of the DV file and placing them into a new file in a different order. However, when you render by adding effects or transitions, you are changing the content of each frame, and therefore recompressing.

As a general rule, if your footage is DV, leave it as DV. No codec can make it better. If you are making fresh graphics in AE and don’t expect to do anything to them (more effects, transitions) you can render them from AE to the DV codec and drop them into your NLE show with the rest of the DV footage.

If however, you’re achiving your graphics and want them to stay relatively clean, render the originals to the Animation codec (or the Photo-JPEG codec if you’re short on space). Those two codecs show little degradation after a couple of recompression passes. (I haven’t done exhaustive tests.)

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Does Task Manager indicate that you are actually using up your RAM? If so, you should be able to track down the cause.

Also, try accessing the secret rendering prefs by holding down shift when you access edit>prefs: keep the shift key down until the dialog appears. Under the secret dialog, purge every 5 frames when rendering.

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

1. Try applying effect>adjust>levels.
2. Go to the end of the animation and keyframe the histogram parameter.
3. Go to the beginning and set your output black to 255.
4. RAM preview.

You may wish to tweak the settings.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

As far as I know, there are no grayscale codecs, only RGB. There are some 256-colour codecs (“graphics” codec?), but they’d have to render within your Premiere timeline and may look like crap.

However … an alpha-only clip will compress more efficiently in an RGB codec just because it’s usually a lot of solid white, solid black, and some gray. There’s just less information to worry about. So I’d just compress it to the same codec as your timeline, that is, Microsoft DV in your case.

BTW, I wouldn’t archive motion graphics to DV, since it degrades too much. Archive to Photo-JPEG for better quality, and only use DV when you have to.

Steve