Theo Veltman
Forum Replies Created
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As soon as you add any light in After Effects all your 3D layers will go black unless the light is pointed at them. Just the same as if you were in a room with no windows and only a flashlight. as a simple rule of thumb try adding an ambient light first and reduce its intensity to create the type of atmosphere you want, then add a spot or point light to enhance what you’re lighting.
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Depends what you’re trying to remove. After effects has a tracker which can be used to track an object then using a mask you can remove said object. If you’re referring to dust and scratches then maybe photoshop would be best. to I’m not sure if Photoshop Elements can load quicktimes though so you’d have to export a frame sequence which you would then need to make back into a movie before re importing to Final Cut (bit of a hassle).
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CS4 resides in a different directory to CS3. Reinstall your plugins.
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Yes you should be able to. This works for property and effects keyrames.
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Hi there, I don’t know what CPU you’re looking at but that’s a hard drive you’ve specified there.
I don’t know exactly how you’re going to use this system but as far as After Effects goes forget OpenGL, I (and I think most people) turn this off, I have never seen any advantage to using a professional graphics card over a powerful run of the mill card either (I could be wrong).
CPU’s and memory are the two main priorities here and simply the more the merrier. memory is cheap these days so whatever you get make sure it has as much memory as you can fit (or afford). I work on an Octo-core Mac and depending on what I’m running it will use all 8 (16 via Hyperthreading) processors rendering with only one instance of After effects so 2x Quadcore processors won’t go unused. It was announced recently that CS5 will be 64bit also which will benefit from the extra memory significantly.
As for your hard drives you’ll want a raid for editing but I’m not sure you’ll need sas drives. You could save yourself some money by using fast sata drives instead. I use Velociraptor drives myself but even a couple of the 1TB HDD’s available on the market now (Western Digital Black e.t.c.) in a raid5 are fast enough for uncompressed playback. Have a good backup system to cover yourself and you’ll be set. -
If the footage is rock solid you could try a quick test with “difference matte” under keying in the effects panel and then garbage mask the shadow but from what I can see you’re probably going to have to rotoscope that hand if you want it separately. If you have CS4 give Mocha a go.
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Try moving all the footage onto a separate volume and move back a few files at a time. open your project reconnect the files you copied save then copy some more over. It should auto replace all the files you copied and be fine as long as you don’t move two many at a time. Alternatively break your main project into smaller ones i.e. if you have a few precomps reduce your master project to these and save each one off separately then load each one at a time, reconnect the footage and save it off. Then reload these into a new master project and do a consolidate footage to remove any double up links. Run a couple of instances of After Effects (sorry I can’t remember how to do this on a PC) at the same time and this shouldn’t take to long to do.
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Hi David, Just as a side note to let you know, Adobe Encore isn’t cross platform compatible as I’ve lernt from experience but everything else is.
The only solution to this I have found is to open a copy of both CS3 and CS4 on your machine. Load the project in CS4 and import the same footage you are using into CS3. Place the footage into timelines as you have in your CS4 project. now on each layer in CS4 press U to bring up keyframes, select them all then copy them go to CS3 and past them onto the same piece of footage (you will need to ad key frames for any attribute you’ve changed and not keyed or enter this manually). If the keyframe is on an effect it will also copy this if it’s available in CS3.
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Or just apply the mosaic plugin (effects/stylize/mosaic) and set the resolution you want.
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Sorry for not elaborating. What I’m doing is loading an instance of after effects and rendering frame 1-50 of my comp then loading another instance of after effects and rendering frame 51-100 then another with frame 101-150 e.t.c. I render to frames but you can render to movies if you like. Then compile them back together afterward. You can also work on another comp or project while you render in the background.
It all depends on what your comp is as to how much of the systems resources are used for each render. I’ve had some projects with heavy effects that only used 1.5gb of memory but 1050% of the cpu (i.e. 11 of the processors for one instance of after effects). Adobe aren’t the only ones finding it hard to code for multiple processors at the moment, it’s a problem everyone’s facing right now along with the move to a 64bit software environment.