[Walter Soyka]

[mathew lisett] “in other words, if none of the footage sources has a complete area of visual im wondering if its posisble to take areas of source footage and blend it with each other to make it complete”

You might be interested in set extension.

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]

Hi Rick,

Might I suggest the Event Videographers forum, too? There is some overlap between our two groups, but there are some folks there who may have valuable suggestions that don’t check here often.

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]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “the Animation CODEC is lossless only if it’s Quality Slider is at or above 87% – so I’ve read.”

I thought it was only lossless at 100%. I can’t say that I’ve experimented to verify, though.

A Quicktime movie with the PNG compressor (not to be confused with a PNG image sequence) is also 8-bit lossless, but should be much more efficient for storing live video than animation is.

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]

[Mark Walczak] “1) Are the .dv files that iMovie creates bit-for-bit replicas of the information on miniDV tape? The .dv files look significantly desaturated compared to the camera LCD and my TV.”

Yes, they are bit-for-bit. Your computer screen will display video differently than a true video monitor, and can’t be trusted for image evaluation.

[Mark Walczak] “2) Would importing .dv files through Final Cut Pro yield better-quality videos than iMovie?”

No; the video content will be identical, but the container will be different. iMovie’s .DV files are a raw DV stream. FCP will wrap the DV stream in an MOV container.

[Mark Walczak] “3) Is there a way to enable the High Quality checkbox within Quicktime without having to save out another .mov file? I would like to simple enable that flag within the .dv file and only worry about handling one file…”

It’s a player preference that won’t actually change your files, but you can set Quicktime Player to default to high quality mode. In my opinion, this should have always been the default.

Quicktime Player > Preferences > General > Use high-quality video setting when available.

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]

[Phil Bates] “Thanks Dave, we are in discussion with Adobe now and one of their engineers has our files. We’ll see how it goes.”

Hi Phil,

Any progress on your Motion-JPEG banding issue? That one really puzzled me, and I’d love to hear how it gets resolved.

Thanks,

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]

[Shaun Harrison] “I have tried tracking, but it’s not very stable and seems a shame to have to do this when I have access to the actual created camera movement data.”

I would have guessed that tracking would be the quickest way to go from 3D to 2D. It might be easier to replace the actual footage with something easier to track (maybe flat color fields or grids ?) and use Mocha instead of AE’s built-in pixel tracker.

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]

[Anders Lilkaer] “Is there a way to control, when the end of the spline shows instead of particle life span?”

Like Michael, I’m having a hard time visualizing what problem you’re running into and what solution you want.

Wouldn’t tweaking the motion path on the light/emitter help?

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]

[simon robbrecht] “UPDATE: if i disable the expressions, the render times are back to normal. So it looks like the mere reference to a textsource in another composition slows the whole thing down. Does anybody have a suggestion?”

Maybe try this: duplicate the comp, then in your copy, convert the expression to keyframes.

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]

[Ricardo Guerreiro] “So I end up with, say, a five minute clip with just 30 seconds of relevant material at the end. In order to save hard-rive space, I’d like to “cut” this clips, the media files themselves, to my FCP in and out points.”

Instead of using Compressor, have you tried FCP’s Media Manager?

You could set it to copy your media into a new project, deleting unused portions.

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]

[mathew lisett] “becuase to me it jumping from 15 hours to over 500 hours just by selectign that plugin seesm to tell me theres a specific bit of hardware im needing to accelerate the process”

Not necessarily. Like David said, 3D mesh warping is really render intensive. 500 hours of render time is only 11 seconds per frame over 90 minutes.

That said, you might be able to speed things up. If you have multiprocessing on, it may be working against you here because of your relatively low amount of RAM.

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