[Tony Kloiber]

Using a reference file points back to your original clip so the quality will be as good as you got and save you time and disc space.

[Brad Baker] “When I open these 2 clips side by side in the QT player, the movie with no compression looks much better than the reference. But when I open both in AE, I’m not seeing any difference between the two.”

Not sure why this would of happen for you. It might be that the reference file clip wasn’t getting the right pixel aspect ratio or some other info for the Qtime player to play it back right. AE is pretty good at figuring this info out.

Don’t forget to maintain the files you use as the export source in FCP and use a naming format that makes sense. Later on you may have to come back to the project and recapture the FCP clips so that the reference files will point to the right file.

If you got some money look at Automatic Duck for the ability to export the whole timeline/sequence and open it up in AE. You could pray Adobe includes XML support (LOL).

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Hi Ron,

That statement of mine “Of course it wasn’t originally developed for the Mac Intel platform but some companies will continue to make software that works on the latest advancements in hardware.”
was one part cheap shot one part to my point, just because it was Apple themselves that worked the software coding (the coding gnomes in the bowels of Apple’s Cupertino labs I sure as well) doesn’t make the fact that a company took a complex program and got it running on the new hardware any less relevant.

At this point we’ve gotten off the beaten path and should take it somewhere else. But before I go I would say that I am as upset at Adobe for what I see as neglect of the Mac user (again there is no Adobe Creative Suite Production Studio Premium for Mac) as you seem to be at Apple for making applications that compete with Adobe (Soundbooth and Lightroom returning the favor). Competition is suppose to help development and pricing. btw Adobe after purchasing macromedia raised prices on the old Macromedia products.

If you want my conspiracy theory on the Apple Adobe relationship I say it started to go bad when Apple inculded pdf viewing and file saving into it’s OS.

As far as Flash is concerned I think I have finally reach snob status cause I say that flash stuff is for the web guy ;>O

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

So I just ran a 00:01:30:00 long render of a 1280 X 720 comp and it worked fine. I used the AE preset called Cells. So from my experience I would say that there is no problem using AE 7 on and Mac Pro Intel machine.

Check your comp for anything that might be happing at the point in which you render stops.

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Well Ron’s position is clear. But I have a Mac Pro as do you (not a Mac Book pro) and I have not had any problems. That being said I have not tried rending any HD material. If your interested take a look at this.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=890250

If you like, you could use Ron’s suggestion (…use software on hardware that manufacturers actually develop for use on that particular platform…) and buy Shake for half the cost of AE and use that instead. Of course it wasn’t originally developed for the Mac Intel platform but some companies will continue to make software that works on the latest advancements in hardware.

I guess what I’m saying is that it might not be a software/hardware issue. Does it stop rendering at the same frame everytime?
If so what layers start at that point or what other changes to the comp happen at that point?

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Works Fine.

Try this
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=890250

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

My solution is use a Mac, but if you like, you might try saving the word doc as an html file open with your browser (You use Mozilla of course 😉 and copy from the browser window.

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Well, I believe you can download it and run it in demo mode so that you can find out for yourself.

If you can bear the excitement :0

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

This is a roto plug in but also has a tracker
https://www.silhouettefx.com/index2.htm

This is a standalone app but export data to AE
https://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/contentfull.aspx?Content=pfhoe_more.htm

Same here
https://www.ssontech.com/

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Ron asked me to pen an article but I’m no writer as my wife likes to say ” he took yearbook for English in high school”. Well I may have started early in life using images instead of words to communicate but I’ll give words a stab here.

You want to know”…how you have accomplished this feat…”. Well I wouldn’t call it a feat. In fact to me your use of the word feat implies some great accomplishment and great accomplishments and me aren’t friends. I really only got a new Apple Intel processor Mac Pro computer and loaded AE 7 on it.

I have a G5 2 GHz Mac at home and have worked on it and a G4 dual 1.25 GHz Mac at work for about two years now. I can tell the difference in the two systems ability to work in AE, the G5 is faster. I don’t think anybody would dispute that.

Between the Intel Mac Pro and the G4 I see a similar difference. There are a number of performance comparisons out there. They popped up as the new Intel processor machine became available. Were are these comparisons? Well I don’t remember them all but http://www.barefeats.com had one. The bad writer I am I’m not going to check to see if their results are relevant, available or even support my belief that; in the things I do day in and day out, AE7 on an Intel Mac is as fast or faster then the old G4 I was working on before (by the way I still use the G4 for other tasks).

You see. That’s a horribly long sentence right there above this line. I’m not sure it’s even a sentence.

Now I’m sure there is some merit to test bench numbers but I don’t make test bench numbers everyday, I work in AE doing Mograph (less and less) and Vfx (more and more). I started a project that’s going to involve some luma keying and Mograph elements and I decided that I was going to try and use Motion. Of course a new element to the project came up that meant I was going to need to do some roto work.

Now I started the first shot in Motion and although the video clip plays back at full speed right from the moment I drop it into the comp window (even with a few effects and a mask or two) the masking/roto tools leave even more to be desired then the ones in AE. So, for the next shot I deiced to do the roto in AE and export a clip with an alpha.

Now AE was slower to work in then Motion in terms of how quickly the clip played back as I made changes (AE has to cache frames before full speed playback). But It did this much faster on the Intel Mac Pro then it did on the G4. I was able to work in AE rotoing this clip faster then I was able to before when working on a G4. There were a number of other things (mostly effects/plugins) that operated faster on the new computer than they did on the old computer. Not mind blowingly, drop my pants and stare kind of faster, but perceivably faster. And perception is what its all about. I’ve said as much in previous posts. It all depends on were your coming from as to whether AE runs better/faster on the new Mac Pro Intel computer. From a G4 1.25 GHz Dual to an Intel Mac Pro 2.66 GHz 2 core Dual (quad) is a step up.

Is it ok to start a sentence with an and? And look at how many times I started, what I believe to be, paragraphs with the word “now” yikes.

Now I understand some people have had problems just getting AE to work on an Intel Mac, that is something I know nothing about. I loaded the program from the install disc and it worked fine. I have Final Cut Studio, AE, Blender and Photoshop (v7) and not much else other than OS 10.4.8. I had Apple up grade the video card and add a drive. I added ram. A basic system. And to this point no problems.

There were two other points brought up in this thread.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=890101

One was about development. Change isn’t always good but it’s always going to happen. The other was about companies making products that tended to encourage the user to say within that companies product line. I like the things Apple has done to bring better/faster less expensive applications together and make them work together. I could say the same about Adobe it if weren’t for the fact that there is no Universal Binary version of their applications yet. I’m sure it will be coming at some point. Oh wait the Adobe Creative Suite Production Studio Premium software isn’t available for Mac at all. Well I continue to hope that Shake gets rolled into Final Cut Studio, a little rework of Livetype and Motion into one program and viola.

One of the things I have problems with most everyday is going back and reworking an old project. You know. It was edited FC, graphics and vfx in AE, type in AI, sound in yet another application and even though I try and keep things in a set manner (capture in edit program, use reference media in other programs) I always seem to be opening and AE project and it’s spending what seems like hours looking for media (if anybody can let me know what that keyboard command is that stops AE from searching for media when you open a project please let me know). What I need is a set of programs that all look at the same media file.

Of course this packaging of programs together has its down side. Back in the day…

I think a good writer is suppose to stay a way from silly little sayings like that.

I started in this line of work just before NLE became a useful tool instead of some crazy configuration of multiple tape decks simulating non-liner editing. I had to fight (and lost a lot of the time) to get people to realize that the same person who edited a program could do the graphics and audio and finish the thing as well. Everything was done by a different individual, much like we have different individual programs to do these tasks. Now that’s not so much the case anymore, people bridge across many different aspects of a project even on the same machine.

The problem lies in packaging this programs under one serial number. Some functions take time for the computer to process and don’t need the operator to pay attention to that function. I can do something else at the same time. I could capture media in Final Cut while on an other machine work in Motion on a different project. This is a different program. I’m not using the same program on two different machines. I’m using a different program on different machine, yet because of the packaging of these programs into a “studio” of applications there is only one serial number and thus I’m locked out of the other program. This hurts my productivity.

Well if you’ve gotten to the end here and understood what I have tried to say, you are a better reader that I am a writer.

Ron I don’t think this is what you asked for but we can’t always get what we what.

Thank you Ron and the forum.

Apologies to M.J. or was it K.R., W.S. and the English language.

Old Computer
Processor: (2) Power PC G4 1.25 GHZ
Memory: 1.25 GB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
Drives: (2) ATA (1) 80 GB (1) 200 GB
Graphics Card: Radon 9600 Pro

New Computer
Processor: 2 X 2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 3 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Drives: (2) Serial-ATA (1) 150 GB (1) 500 GB
Graphics Card: Radon X1900 XT

TonyTony

[Tony Kloiber]

Definitely, I was saying as much back in the days of the repackaging of the stand alone apps. into FC Studio and Creative Suites.

I also thought this was a laugh from Microsoft. https://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2164

TonyTony