[Thai Tran]

I have a similar problem with my Intuos 3. It registers a click even though I haven’t clicked. So sometimes when I go to tap, it’s registering the tap as a second click, thereby opening up the item I clicked on. In AE this is really annoying because it keeps opening up comps.

It’s really annoying in all other instances too, because it means I’m dealing with random clicks. Deselections happen. RAM previews stop. All sorts of annoying little problems.

Anyone else have a similar situation?

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”

[Thai Tran]

Awesome. Don’t everyone answer all at once. It makes my head spin.

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”

[Thai Tran]

Anyone?

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”

[Thai Tran]

There is a script called Throttle over at AEscripts.com that allows you to adjust the MP attributes of AE on the fly. You can turn it on or off as well as specify how many cores to use. Other options include the ability to switch from 8 to 16 to 32 bit (even though you can do this by option+clicking on the “8bpc” in the project window. AND it allows you to turn on Idle Rendering, which allows AE to continue rendering when you are parked on a frame if you switch to another app.

There is also a variant of the script which puts a purge button at your disposal. However, you can use Option+Apple+Slash(num pad) shortcut to do that same thing. Good if you don’t want to memorize the shortcut.

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”

[Thai Tran]

I have the same issue with a bunch of 8-core MacPro’s in our studio. This seems to happen when I am trying to do multiprocessing on each machine. To fix the skip file hang-up, start the same render again using only one core (either by force quitting the BG processes or just starting the render again without MP turned on). The machines will skip files correctly instead of taking eternity to skip one file.

This is just obscene. You have these $3k machines working in tandem and they can only render using one of their eight cores. WTF?!

Each of our boxes has anywhere from 6GB’s to 8GB’s of RAM. I’ve adjusted the Maximum RAM Cache Size to use only 1GB so there should be enough memory available for each BG process to work with. But there are always problems on render output. For instance:

MP RENDERING ON ONE BOX: The render will go using 8 cores for a few frames then quit the BG processes and go back to one core rendering. Seems to be random. Furthermore, at other times, it will just take longer (relative to single core rendering) to render frames. However, RAM preview doesn’t seem to run into this issue, it works great actually (other than the slight lag when you go into and out of a RAM preview).

MP RENDERING ON MULTIPLE BOXES: When the boxes come upon a pre-existing frame spit out by another box they will take forever to skip that frame. I’ve tried splitting up the comp into sections for each machine, but then the boxes will run into either the BG-process-quitting problem or the slow-as-molasses-processing-of-frames problem.

I’m open to any and all suggestions because right now I’ve got four 8-core machines and it’s a shame that it takes all of them running to do the work that one machine could potentially do by itself. For shame, Adobe. For shame….

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”

[Thai Tran]

Thanks for the response, Mike. However…

Merging layers like one would do normally, does not work in the animation palette for some reason. The animation layers (I guess they’re called video “layers”) will merge alright, but all the frames in the layer will only be the frame you merged on.

So for example, let’s say you had an animation of a bouncing ball over 30 frames that you had done on multiple layers, for whatever reason. If you had your timeline marker parked on the frame where it is up in the air and you proceeded to merge all the layers, then your merged layer will only show the ball up in the air across all frames of your animation.

There should be a way to merge all your animated frames down into one layer for easy editing of your animation. But I can’t seem to find one.

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried in the first place.”