[Walter Soyka]

[al brown] “do my project settings need to be anything specific? my color settings are 32 bit (fl) + working space is set to none. also unticked are blend colours and match legacy. “

I’d leave these settings as they are, unless there’s a specific working space (perhaps for HD or film stock) you’ve been asked to use. Since you’re working at 32bpc, I’d choose the “Over Range” preset, with Units set to Decimal in the Cineon settings. Values above 1.0 will be clipped (highlight roll-off of 0).

I only have limited experience with this, so perhaps someone else will chime in if I’ve missed something.

Perhaps you can deliver a brief test to make sure that your deliverable is as expected?

[al brown] “i don’t have a monitor. will i be able to test if it’s worked just by applying the Log to Lin conversion?”

You will be able to see this in the comp window on your computer monitor.

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]

Since you’re presumably working in a linear space, you have to convert your sequence to a logarithmic space on output — just select the “Standard” preset in Output Module > Format Settings > Cineon Settings.

To test on your monitor, re-import your DPX sequence to AE; it should appear horribly washed out. Apply a “Log to Lin” Cineon conversion and it should look like your original.

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]

[Kazumi Hatori] “I did it in compressor by chosing Program Stream,
bitrate to 34 Mbps, and tried to turn frame control ON”

No need to use Frame Controls unless you are changing the frame size or frame rate.

[Kazumi Hatori] “What way can I have a better MPEG-II output other than compressor?”

There are several other compression applications, including Telestream Episode, Sorenson Squeeze, and Adobe Media Encoder. They all produce different MPEG-2 encodes, and perhaps you would prefer one of these.

That said, adding a little noise to gradients is important to prevent banding, because it forces the compressor to allocate more bits to that area of the image (thus increasing quality) than it would otherwise.

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]

[Michael Straub] “I am currently creating a bitmap sequence for a broadcast graphics box(only supports bmps). After exporting them from AE I took them back in to test and noticed that the end result is blurred and the edges are cut off.”

So you render to a BMP sequence in AE, and then when you test it on the playback device, it doesn’t look right?

What is the playback device, and have you met its specs exactly?

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 Werdmuller von Elgg] “I am missing a number of “output module” templates and formats, including lossless, quicktime, and ram-preview options.”

You could try resetting the After Effects preferences; hold Cmd-Opt-Shift while starting AE.

[Simon Werdmuller von Elgg] “I get a dialogue box stating: “After Effects error: could not convert Unicode characters. (23 :: 46)””

Any funky characters in any text layers, markers, or footage items? See Mylenium’s AE error database entry.

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]

[Aymeric De Meautis] “My situation is I’ve got a 13 second AE composition, with minimal effects, and one large background. The background is 2800×1080 (its a long rectangle for an HD composition. Pretty much a solid with fractual noise applied to it (so it looks like stars in the background). The camera pans across the screen so thats why its 2800 long.”

This is not a direct answer to your question, but I’d usually use a particle system (like Particular or CC Particle World) to generate a star field that reacts to the camera; it’ll render a lot faster and use a bit less RAM than Fractal Noise.

[Aymeric De Meautis] “It either keeps crashing and saying “unable to allocate space for 2800 x 1080 image buffer” I’ve done the “Secret menu” which doesnt work, have multi-processing switched on, played with the settings for either longer ram preview or faster rendering – keeps crashing, purged all, cleared the cache…saved the file in different locations..nothings helped.”

What secret settings did you use? In the regular multiprocessing menu, how many processes are you allowing? Try leaving more processors available to other applications.

As Brian mentioned, pre-rendering that big comp is a great idea. You could even temporarily turn off multiprocessing just for the pre-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]

I always do multiscreen editorial with an offline/online model.

In my opinion, there is no off-the-shelf software that handles this well from end to end, so I do my creative offline in FCP and then online in After Effects. I will consider Premiere Pro CS5 (with the Mercury playback engine) for my next multiscreen edit.

I completely agree with Gary’s advice, and I’d like to emphasize the last point he made: you need to understand your deliverable before designing your workflow.

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]

[Balazs Frank] “However I think the 1080p 30fps H.264 would not be a problem at YouTube and video sharing sites, is this “30fps” non-standard setting for fullHD may affect the playback quality? I mean here not playing videos by computers, but e.g media players or home cinema systems that can access and play the content of video sharing sites? Are these able to play non-interlaced (progressive) with 30 fps material without a problem?”

YouTube specifically does not care what frame rate you use, so you’ll find a variety of rates online. 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30 and other arbitrary rates are all acceptable. They specifically recommend against re-sampling the frame rate. See Optimizing your video uploads from YouTube for more.

I suppose it depends on the system, but I would think that any media player that pulls content from YouTube would be built to be pretty lenient on acceptable playback specs. Is there a specific device you’re targeting?

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]

It sounds like each comp that you reference will need to have a different name. I’d give each one a unique name in each project before importing them for 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]

[Kazumi Hatori] “It’s kind of weird that the high bitrate MPEG-II is so much different from the “look-okay” Quicktime movie.Though, I tried to double the noise amplitude,
and the MPEG-II looks fine without banding, but slightly noise.
This is so far I can come up with, but I still wonder
how do Professional guys output a clean color gradient on broadcasting?
MPEG-II isn’t a way?”

How are you compressing your MPEG-2? What bitrate? It sounds like you’re using Compressor, which, in my opinion, uses a lousy MPEG-2 encoder.

There’s a Compression techniques forum here on the COW which might also be helpful for you.

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