[Todd Kopriva]

I’m just speculating, since I don’t know exactly what you’re seeing, but…

Consider that using the region of interest when you’re previewing restricts the rendering of the composition to only a subset of the frame. It’s not a simple cropping operation (which would be a post-render step). So, some plug-ins may behave differently if you’re giving them a smaller part of the composition frame to use as input. Trapcode 3D Stroke may be one such plug-in.

This doesn’t mean that the region of interest is broken; it means that the plug-in doesn’t deal as… um… intelligently with the region of interest constraint as it could.

Like I said, I don’t know that this is what’s happening in your case, but it surely does sound familiar.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Think of it this way:

The source footage item is an image sequence. The composition contains a layer that refers to that footage item. At each frame in the composition, the layer asks its source footage item for a frame for the corresponding time. If your composition frame rate is 24fps, and your footage item frame rate is 72fps, the layer is only asking the footage item to provide one frame in three.

So, your frames aren’t “going” anywhere. You’ve just set it up so that the composition isn’t using them.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

One wrinkle is that the weightings aren’t identical across plug-ins, because some plug-in developers have been… um… not careful in researching their numbers.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Does this page about the speed graph help?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

As usual, Kevin’s information is spot-on. I’ll follow by giving you some links to pages with some more information about precompositions and parenting.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I was able to render the first couple of thousand frames with no problem in about ten minutes. I need to shut this computer (my laptop) down and head to the office now, so I had to stop the render.

It seems to me that you’ve just got a rather complex composition—a lot of keyframes and expressions—so there’s naturally going to be a lot of computation involved.

When you say that it would “grind to a halt”, what do you mean, exactly? Sometimes, you just have to leave a long and complex composition to render overnight.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of your problem. I’m just saying that from a quick render test it seemed to me that you should try leaving this to render for a long time and see if it works.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I’m rendering the composition from your uploaded file right now. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

Please send bug reports (including offending project files) to aebugs@adobe.com.

You can also submit bugs using the bug-report/feaure-request form.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I am happily using 64-bit Windows Vista (though I’m typing this on my Mac). After Effects CS4 is not officially supported on 64-bit Windows XP.

Some people who know more than I do about this kind of thing have suggested that the upgrade path to Windows 7 will be less painful from Vista.

None of this is a recommendation one way or the other. I’m just giving you a few facts and thoughts.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

i will be upgrading tonight!

Great! I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to find what you needed sooner.

only thing more I would expect is you do us all a favor and make this information accessible on the AE page! You would probably get allot more business. (how the heck do you find what you sent me?)
i looked for info on this when AE9 came out and could not find anything bout Mocha being included!

The page that you linked to (https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/features/?view=topnew) has a section on mocha. It’s the third item down in the second column. It’s also mentioned on the new features page.

The page that I linked to is the first page in the “Tracking and stabilizing motion” section of the After Effects CS4 Help document on the Web.

In general, I recommend using the After Effects Community Help search to find details about After Effects.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

idea off the top of my head:

You could set up your render queue so that the last item in the queue is a little dummy item that renders and exports a file with a certain name to a certain folder. You can have a job running that checks for the presence of that file and only runs your copy operation after it detects the presence of that file.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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