Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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Well, sometimes we want the 2D background to always be there. I suppose a pref setting to “hide 2D layers from side/top orthogonal views” might be useful.
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[Michael Ricks] “Add the Composition to the Render Queue and render it out that way.”
I don’t think that’s possible, since WMV is not QT and has to be accessed from the Export menu when working on the Mac.
Is your work area set to the desired length?
Do you have the Flip4mac plugin? -
Make a marker where you want one (or the other) to end up. Drag the keyframes, then the layer.
In AE you can drag a bunch of keyframes, or a bunch of layers. Not both types of things at the same time.
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We’re doing processor-heavy work in a compositing app. NLEs allow us to do a few things (transitions and some effects) quickly because those few things have been designed to work quickly in a one-layer editing environment.
But just try stacking more than one of those effects on a clip in your NLE and boom — you have to render.
So that’s the price we pay with AE’s massive layering ability: render time.
Once they made cards that accelerated third-party effects. But the effects had to be programmed specifically for those cards. Then those cards became obsolete (slower than the computers’ processors). For that reason, I doubt we’ll see anything like that again on the desktop market — why make that kind of investment in hardware?
All we can do it wait for two things:
1. processors to get faster
2. AE’s OpenGL implementation to improve. But once we start adding effects, we’ll probably be back at #1, since OpenGL can’t accelerate everything.Or we could just buy what we can, and build the delays into our workflow, thankful that we can afford something this fast at this price, compared to the Discreet “big iron”:
“Manufacturers Suggested List Price for the Discreet visual effects systems are: inferno 5–$571,500; flame 8–$266,500; flint 8–$99,000. “
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Nope. That’s just the way it works, because 2D layers are not affected by camera angle.
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It sounds like it should be a slam-dunk, but it isn’t yet. One trick is to pick a lens that is a likely match for the original lens (guess by eye), then make a grid of solids. These solids are in different positions, but all the same angle, as if they are all auditioning for the part of the billboard in the shot. Move your camera around until one of them matches the perspective and position of the original shot. Scale it up until it matches the size of the billboard in the shot.
This is where your fancy 3D billboard should go. Leave the camera alone now, and move the billboard to that position.
It just might work …
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[Darby Edelen] “My recommendation is that you do your renders as PSD sequences… This way you will only need to render out a small minority of trouble frames later on down the road. “
Hear, hear!
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In my opinion, you don’t need to see it full-res & full frame rate every time you tweak a setting.
Part of working with CG is compromising due to the hardware. In 3D apps, we work in wireframe when there are too many polys for OpenGL. We do a beauty preview still, then change the things that don’t require a full preview, such as animation pacing, positioning and so on. When it comes time to check the lighting, we use OpenGL or make a full preview.
In AE, unless the effect is out of position (or does other wrong things) at lower res, we can check the animation, rough positioning and a lot of other things with a low-res preview and skipping frames. Also, if you’re doing a lot of books with similar animation, do you really need to see all of them at full frame rate? Do the first one at full frame rate, then do the others by skipping frames at lower res. Save the full res, full frame preview for the very last preview.
In short, there’s no other way to speed up previews of what you’re doing on that machine.
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Check out Data Animator from Digital Anarchy.
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Mac:
cmd+left/right arrow
PageUp/Dn