[Todd Kopriva]

> Dang! And no one’s mentioned broadcastGEMs? Sigh …

The last time I tried to go to the Freebies section of that site (when I was compiling a list of free resources), I got a 404 error.

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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]

Regarding animating the path: Are you drawing a shape path on a shape layer, or are you drawing a mask?

Either way, the process is essentially the same. You animate mask paths and shape paths in much the same way that you animate other properties: set keyframes for the Mask Path or Path property, set paths at each keyframe, and After Effects will interpolate between these specified values.

See “Editing and animating shape paths and masks”.

You can also animate a path drawn with a paint tool. See “Animate and edit paint strokes”.

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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]

> If I upgrade to 12gb of RAM and Vista 64 bit will be able to use all my cores effectively?

Yes, I recommend using a 64-bit operating system.

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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 not a fan of using particle effects to simulate fog/smoke/vapor when you can just composite some real footage of fog/smoke/vapor into you scene. It’s hard to make vapor simulated with a particle effect look realistic. Stock footage of smoke is pretty easy to get.

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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]

That’s a tiny amount of RAM for 8 cores. RAM starvation of multiple cores actually slows things down, as the multiple processes start up, find out that they don’t have enough RAM to do anything useful, and then shut back down.

If I were using your system, I’d allocate nearly 2GB to each core and only use two cores (leave 6 for other applications).

Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously isn’t going to make everything always go faster. Here’s an excerpt from the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences section of After Effects Help.

“The number of background processes that can run on your computer also depends on the total amount of installed system RAM and the amount of RAM that is assigned to the After Effects application. The amount of RAM required for each background process varies depending on your system configuration; at least 1 GB per process is recommended. Optimum performance is achieved with computer systems with at least 2 GB of installed RAM per processor core.
…
Using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature does not speed up the rendering of all compositions. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature works best at improving performance when the resource that is most exercised by the composition is CPU processing power, such as when applying a processor-intensive effect like a glow or blur.”

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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]

There are instructions for dealing with vertical text scrolls/crawls in the “Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video” section of After Effects Help. That section directs you to an animation preset for getting the right speed.

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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 fairly sure that AE ‘officially’ supports .mxf but have a feeling mxf is one of those standards that isn’t actually… you know, standard….

MXF is a container format, much like QuickTime. What matters is what’s inside the MXF file. Here’s a quote from “Supported import formats” that tells what contents of MXF files After Effects currently supports:

“Media eXchange Format (MXF)
MXF is a container format. After Effects can only import some kinds of data contained within MXF files. After Effects can import the Op-Atom variety used by Panasonic DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, and DVCPRO HD video cameras to record to Panasonic P2 media. After Effects can also import XDCAM HD files in MXF format.”

Of course, we’re always adding support for new formats in updates, so be sure to pay attention to your Adobe Updater and/or announcements of updates to After Effects.

For information about OMF and AAF import, see “Importing AAF and OMF files (Windows only)”.
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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 strongly recommend getting footage of real smoke and compositing it into the shot, rather than simulating smoke with a particle effect. You can use Distort effects to bend and manipulate the real smoke. Simulating smoke is hard, render-intensive, and not as realistic as real smoke.

There are some tips in After Effects Help about working with smoke, too.

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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]

Microsoft DV = Yuck.

When you’re rendering and encoding for transfer from one application to another (as opposed to rendering and encoding for final output), you want to use something lossless. That DV codec is very lossy.

I recommend using something like the Animation codec in a QuickTime container.

Then again, if you’re going from Premiere Pro to After Effects and you have the Production Premium or Master Collection suite, you can use Dynamic Link.

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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]

My first thought is to remove the OpenGL plug-in. Instructions for this are in this Technical Support article on the Adobe website:

“Troubleshoot OpenGL problems in After Effects CS3”

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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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