[Walter Soyka]

You’re welcome, Ike. Good luck with your 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
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[Walter Soyka]

Adding to Dave’s list of questions…

Click on your external drive on your Desktop, then Cmd-I to get info. Is the drive formatted as FAT32 (MS-DOS) or HFS+ (Mac OS Extended)?

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]

In general, I’ll second Dave’s recommendation to get as much RAM as possible.

I’ll also point out that those calibrators are intended for print work. If you want accurate monitoring of video, you should invest in an AJA or BMD card and a broadcast monitor.

You might consider adding another drive to both machines for renders. In some cases, this will give you a speed boost since one drive is not doing all the reading and writing.

Finally, I’ll point out a couple resources you may not have seen:

Improve performance in After Effects
Video Cards for Adobe Premiere CS5 (haven’t tried this)

[Eric Richner] “1) Which drives should I run my projects off of? OS Drive or Scratch Disk?”

I don’t think this matters as much in 2010 as it did in 2000. History suggests running your projects off the OS drive, but I run projects and media off a fast RAID without any trouble.

[Eric Richner] “2) Should I have my Media Cache set to my internal Scratch Disk?”

No. Treat the cache like footage.

[Eric Richner] “3) Would having the Projects and the Cache on the same drive affect the performance (if it was all on the OS drive or the Scratch Disk)”

Your disks spend a lot more time accessing media than they do the project files. I don’t think this will have a noticeable impact on performance.

[Eric Richner] “4) Amount of RAM to allocate to the programs?”

See Dave’s response — as much as possible. AE is 64-bit in CS5, and it can use however much memory you can cram into your system.

[Eric Richner] “For PC #2:
1)Should I use the internal Scratch Disk or just use my 8TB USB 3.0 (up to 5.0gb/s connection) External RAID5 as the Media Cache + Scratch Disk location?”

I use my RAID. I’d suggest you do the same.

[Eric Richner] “Regarding Nucleo Pro 3:
Depending on the best settings recommended for the questions above, should I have the following:
1) Root cache directory for Spec Preview, Render, Precomp Proxy set on the OS drive or Scratch Disk?
2) Should I “Enable cache creation for Spec Preview”?
3) Which is the fastest/highest quality option for: (a) Render Options (b) Fast Preview Options
3) Any other settings to look in to?”

I used to use Nucleo Pro specifically for its spec render feature. Regular multiprocessing in AE is pretty good, so I’ve stopped using NP.

If you do choose to use it, treat the cache files like footage.

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]

[juan perez] “my question: is it possible to “tell” AE to “forget” the old dft/dfx effects and use, instead, the corresponding present v.2.0.2.1 ones with the same settings? thank you very much in advance!”

I don’t believe that this is possible to do. I’d contact Tiffen for support. Most other plugin developers are very careful to make sure that older projects will open properly.

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]

Huh. Good to know! Thanks for posting back with the solution.

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]

[Joachim Blunck] “I can easily create a group of 15 subclips from those markers.
How can I get Media Manager (or some other feature) to create 15 discrete QT movs”

Batch Export.

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]

[Federico Kotek] “Hope you dont mind seeing your name on another man chest!”

Happy to help! Let your tattoo artist know that my branding guidelines specify Trade Gothic for my primary typeface.

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]

This looks like a good case for expressions.

Create a comp that contains nothing but the footage elements you want to randomly cut between.

Add a null object as the first layer in the comp and name it Control.

Add a Slider Control effect to the null, and Alt-click the keyframe stopwatch for Slider. Enter this expression:
Math.abs(Math.round(wiggle(5, thisComp.numLayers-2)))+2


Now, for each footage item, Alt-click the transparency keyframe stopwatch and enter the follow expression:
if (thisComp.layer("Control").effect("Slider Control")(1) == index) 100 else 0

So here’s how all that works.

The null object’s slider randomly picks an integer value between 2 and the total number of layers. This is called a layer index. Each footage layer is looking at that slider to see when it’s layer number is “called.” For example, when the slider reads 4, layer 4’s opacity jumps to 100 while all other layers’ opacities drop to 0. Layer 1 is never called, because that’s where the slider itself lives.

For faster or slower cutting, change the number 5 after the “wiggle” expression in the first code block.

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]

AE is not really built for true 3D like this.

That said, FreeForm is now included with AE CS5 and ought to do what you need.

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]

If there’s anything I can clarify, please feel free to ask.

I’m glad to hear that your comp is working better!

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