[Walter Soyka]

[ninetto makavejev] “I have not experimented extensively with Blu-ray files, would there be any reason at all to prefer the H.264 format?”

Yes — it looks about the same as MPEG2 at half the bitrate.

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]

[Steven Nichols] “Do you mean if you have like 4 GB of RAM on a 4-core machine, that means AE only has 1 GB/core during rendering ?”

Even worse than that — about 1GB will go the operating system, leaving you only 3GB of RAM.

With a 4-core machine with only 4GB of RAM, multiprocessing will actually slow your renders down, and I’d recommend leaving it set off. Essentially, each instance of the renderer will be constantly stealing RAM from other instances, slowing your render down dramatically versus allowing a single instance to have access to all the RAM it needs.

Todd Kopriva from Adobe has written an excellent blog post that goes into a little more depth — Performance tip: Don’t starve your software of RAM.

[Steven Nichols] “Does that also affects RAM preview ?”

RAM preview is limited to however many frames can fit in RAM available to the main AE process running the GUI. Before CS5, this process could grab at most about 3.5 GB of RAM, putting an absolute limit on your RAM preview length irrespective of your total system RAM.

Now that AE CS5 is 64-bit, the main AE process will be able to address all the RAM in your computer, so if you want longer RAM previews, all you have to do is open your wallet and pour money into memory.

There’s a lot of information on all this, as well as plenty of other performance tips, in the After Effects forum.

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]

Upgrade installations are tricky; a lot of posters here on the COW had problems like this after upgrade installs. It’s usually better to erase and install, then re-install applications.

You might try resetting the AE preferences, or even un-installing then re-installing AE and plugins before taking more drastic measures.

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]

[Steve Nield] “Thanks, can you suggest a good render manager that supports both Mac and pc ? “

No personal experience, but the major players include Pipeline FX Cube, Prime Focus Deadline, and Axceleon EnFuzion. I would contact sales from each of these developers and see if they have any experience with a setup similar to yours, or see if demos are available. I’d love to hear back about your findings.

If you’re handy with the command line, you could automate rendering yourself with aerender. I’ve used aerender before to assign groups of frames to specific render nodes and eliminate a good amount of the network and disk overhead of a traditional watch folder render.

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]

[Steven Nichols] “I need speed in FCP3 and After Effects CS5: do all of those apps really benefit from a 12-core machine at 2.66 GHz or will a 6-core at 3.33 GHz perform better ?”

The other posters have addressed FCP; I’ll cover After Effects.

After Effects can use multiple cores through its multiprocessing feature. Essentially, in order to render multiple frames simultaneously, After Effects launches multiple instances of its renderer, and each instance works on one frame at a time.

To use multiprocessing in After Effects, you need lots of RAM. Before CS5, I used to recommend 2-4 GB per core. Since CS5 is 64-bit, you could now use even more than 4 GB per core, though I don’t think it would be necessary for most users. In other words, while you can get away with 8 to 12 GB of RAM for a Final Cut Pro system, if you want to use multiprocessing on a 12-core, you’ll want a minimum of 24 GB of system 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

[Walter Soyka]

[clyde villegas] “I adjusted the resolution to highest and the banding was still there. But when I used the Intel Indeo® Video 4.5, the banding was removed (the available codecs are Cinepak Codec by Radius, Intel Indeo® Video 4.5, Microsoft Video 1). Now, my problem is the frame rate. The video is not running smoothly.”

All three of these codecs were developed in the early 1990s. I don’t think any of them are really suited for high resolution, high bit depth, high frame rate screen capture.

Camtasia really is the gold standard for screen capture on a PC. It uses the proprietary TSCC/Ensharpen codec internally, and I’ve never seen banding in a Camtasia capture.

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]

[Steve Nield] “My question is that if I want to add a pair of the new 12 core mac pro work stations to the network and assuming that they are also running CS4, will they be able to participate in a watch folder render or are there likely to be issues with having macs creating the project files and pc’s trying to render them?”

All render engines must interpret footage and output paths the same way, so cross-platform network rendering can be tricky.

Also, network rendering with watch folders is really network and disk-intensive. You might want consider using a render manager instead of watch folders.

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]

[Bob Zelin] “you have answered your own question. People replace their editing computers when they can’t run the software they want to.”

I agree with Bob.

Looking back, this has been about every 3 years for me.

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]

[Dave LaRonde] “Sure. To make the kind you’re thinking about, animate the arrow, and render out of AE with an alpha channel — QT’s PNG codec is a good choice. It works well in FCP. To make the transition, put the animated arrow above the outgoing and incoming clips. Then use a slide transition on the incoming clip. Time it out to match the timing of the arrow.”

Dave, if you’re using FCP 7, you will love the new Alpha Transition effect.

You apply Alpha Transition to an edit point in FCP, just like any other transition. Open the Alpha Transition in the Viewer, then drag and drop three clips into the image wells: clip (fill), clip alpha matte (key), and wipe matte.

You don’t have to worry about trying to match the wipe to the motion; you can change the duration of the transition, and it will automatically apply speed ramps for you; and you can copy and paste the transition.

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]

[Jacqueline Bauer] “Is it possible to create 8bit pixel animation like https://vimeo.com/channels/pixel/page:1 from pictures / photos? Is there a plug-in for AE available?”

VFX artists think backwards. What characterizes the 8-bit look? Low resolution, a small color palette, no anti-aliasing, and maybe a lower frame rate? So how do you get each of those looks? A couple suggestions:

Low resolution: work in a low-res comp, then pre-comp it, scale it up, and render in Draft mode instead of Best Settings

Small color palette: Posterize effect, perhaps Colorama effect

No anti-aliasing: This should come automatically by reducing the resolution and palette

In practice, though, it’ll be difficult to get the old 8-bit video games look as a final pass over a completed piece. Old video games didn’t use converted photos and videos; they were actually drawn a pixel at a time in the limited palette 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