[Walter Soyka]

I’d try rendering out to an image sequence to see if that renders undistorted. This will help us figure out where the problem lies.

Image rasters larger than 4K seems to be a problem for some containers and codecs. How do you actually deliver to the media server that feeds the board?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Walter Soyka]

[Stephen Rutherford] “The largest resolution screen that we have is 13,194 pixels wide. Historically, I have been able to render with no troubles. However, with CS5, the larger-width renders are getting messed up. The first 2500 pixels or so are good (from the left-hand side), but then it starts distorting as the image goes farther left.”

A couple questions:

Where precisely does the distortion start? Does it happen to be after 2560 pixels?

Have you updated to AE 10.0.1? It fixes a lot of bugs.

Are you rendering with OpenGL? If so, what happens if you disable it?

What format are you rendering to? Have you tried rendering to an image sequence?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Tamal Sen] “Hi, I am a film student in India, and I have made a 25 minute diploma film, shot on 35mm… My question is this- the dpx scan has a lot of black area in it(the masks at the top and bottom)- since I have never done a dpx scan before, is that how the scanning is normally done? I was under the impression that only the picture and not the mask would be scanned… This is where we are stuck- what should we output it as? Because uncompressed, the output video would form almost 2.7 terabytes. What compression should we use so that it wouldn’t tax hard disk space but allow for a good Hdcam tape transfer?”

These questions for your film lab and finishing post house; we could give general guidance, but not the specific answers that only come from the vendors you’re working with.

Since you scanned at HD resolution, you will visibly soften the image when scaling it up 134% for HD mastering — though it should still be plenty for standard definition. Unfortunately, the only way to get those lost pixels back would be to rescan with adjusted framing.

Ask your video post production facility what mastering format they’d like. They might accept ProRes or DNxHD instead of uncompressed.

Also, 1920×1080 @ 23.976 fps at 10bit uncompressed YUV is only 200GB or so for 25 minutes.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Tobias Becker] “Why does QuickTime (Player) add 1 frame to every video?”

I can’t replicate the problem you’re seeing — I’m working on a piece of looping media now, and I’m not seeing any phantom frames directly out of AE like you are. Sometimes I get extra frames when I compress media to h264 — possibly because it needs to close a GOP — but I see that you’re working with ProRes media, so that shouldn’t be the issue here.

I’d do what Ted suggested and trim the bogus frames off of the file and save.

Also, make sure the Cache (hint) checkbox in Window > Show Movie Properties > Other Settings is checked; you can use it to force Quicktime to cache tracks in RAM to improve looping performance.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Mees] “I can use a mask to hide parts of the layer that the mask is on, but how do you get the mask to effect other layers as well? I guess I have some reading to do, it seems like it would be quite obvious.”

You’re right — this is very straightforward with a nodal compositor, but so no clear with a layer compositor like After Effects.

The classic way is to precompose, and then either mask, use a track matte, or get fancy with preserve transparency.

Personally, I’d draw a shape layer where you need to obscure the layers. Use the set matte effect on each of your objects to take a matte from your shape layer and invert it. Finally, hide the shape layer. When the objects pass into the area masked by the shape layer, they’ll disappear.

Some of these methods may work better for your particular situation than others.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Mees] “have divided the phonograph speaker into 2 images on separate layers: The front of the speaker and the back of the speaker so that the object can pass “through” or “into” the speaker and not just behind it.”

You could keep the phonograph intact for puppeting, and use a mask or track matte to obscure the objects.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

You could do the audio separately. One of the leaders on the forum here, Dave LaRonde, uses audio in his AE projects for reference only, and manages the visuals and audio in his NLE. His work is always in sync and frame accurate.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Andy Joseph] “I’ve made this small 36 seconds motion graphics promo in AE CS3, everything seems to be in perfect sync when i preview it as RAM preview. Now when i render it as .mov using photo-jpg codec then audio goes out of sync by fractions of second. Now when i import that rendered QT back into after effects then again it works fine with RAM preview.”

With high quality settings, Photo-JPEG makes some pretty large files that few systems can play back in real time. Since RAM preview works after you re-import the file, I think that the file is fine and your problem is in playback.

I’d suggest that you compress your Photo-JPEG Quicktime file to a more playback-friendly format (perhaps h264).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Ken Harper] “So my client has contracted us to do a video, we are shooting HDTV 1920×1080 and they send me the specs. The video will need to be edited to fit 3072 x 768 pixels in order to meet our Oct 7 open house needs. This came from their PR&Web department. What format is this?”

You should go back to the client to get more information. As Alan said, they may be three separate screens or one large one. In either scenario, they’re probably using a specialized playback system with very specific delivery requirements. You’ll want to know specifically what video container, codec and frame rate you’re expected to deliver, as well as whether you need to deliver one large file or three pre-split ones.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Matthew King] “I’m running AE CS4 on MAC OS X 10.5.8 laptop with 4GB of RAM.”

That’s not a lot of RAM for After Effects. If you have multiprocessing turned on, you should absolutely disable it.

You might consider rendering to an image sequence — if an image sequence render fails, you can simply start it again at the next frame, continuing right where you left off.

As a last resort — there’s a secret menu in the preferences where you can disable the layer cache and set AE to purge frames during render. Hold down the Shift key, and keep it down. Click After Effects > Preferences > General. Continue to hold the Shift key, and click on the list of preferences. You should see a “Secret” item where you can make these changes.

If your renders were working perfectly, you would see a big performance hit for mucking with these settings; however, since they are not, it may help. Don’t forget to reset them for your next project.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events