[Walter Soyka]

[Anders Lilkaer] “Then when i try find the project in the watch folder, from the Render Engine on another computer, i starts open the project! (so far so good),and i get to see a tiny glimpse of the project, and then it fails, and starts searching for the project again — does anyone know what i do wrong here? I have an approaching deadline, so it’ll be reallly great to hear from you hardcore dudes out here. “

What does the log file say?

Do all the render nodes have read and write permission to the shared storage? Do they all have all third-party plugins and fonts installed?

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 came up very recently. See this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/981829

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]

[jason friedrich] “What seems to be happening is that after a few comps are rendered, a machine will totally lose the render ‘list’ and the watch window pops up and keeps going through the finished comps, but, never picking up on the remaining items to be rendered. It’s driving us nuts. Usually, if you shut down the render engine and restart, it seems to pick up the watch folder project and carry on. Any suggestions? “

That’s very odd behavior; how many machines do you allow when you collect files? What does the log file say?

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]

[Abin Alexander] “Hi everyone, I want to know that is there’s any free vfx software like After Effects that I can use for my short film?”

I’m with Dave; I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think there is anything comparable to AE. In my opinion, the single best thing about After Effects is the vibrant ecosystem that’s built around it: both third-party developers and end-user communities like this one. Even if you can find some free software that does what you need, it’s unlikely to have the same depth of third-party developer and end-user support that makes AE great.

That said, if you’re on a Mac and you have Final Cut Studio, you already have Motion, which you could use for effects and compositing. Also, there’s Blender, an open-source, free 3D app, which does have a built-in nodal compositor — though it’s nothing like AE.

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]

[jim lefevre] “I’ve got a project with 59 scenes/comps of differening lengths within it and having worked my way through the main body of work I’ve just found out that all of the comps have the wrong shutter angle/sampling (in composition settings/advanced). Is there any way of being able to change all comps very simply or is it simply a case of me having just learned a lesson in thinking things through before creating lots of comps and just doing them all manually? “

The Selected_Comps_Changer.jsx script, courtesy of the brilliant Christopher Green, will get you halfway there. Select all the comps you want to change, run the script, and enter in the new shutter angle and phase.

https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/

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’ve done a couple stereo tests with AE, and I found it really cumbersome because the software itself lacks built-in stereo support. Nuke might be a better option, because stereo support is built-in to the application.

Check out Chris Keller’s awesome stereoscopic scripts for After Effects. I’ve used them a few times. The workflow is still a bit clunky because of AE’s limitations, but these scripts are an incredibly well thought-out workaround for this, and they will save you hours and hours of work.

You might find some more information on the Stereoscopic 3D forum here.

I’ll also point out a couple threads that helped me:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/10

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/84

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 Szalapski] “American Robins tend to fly rather low to the ground (probably because they’re so fat [that’s not an Americans Are Fat joke, American Robins just look fat…okay, it’s sort of an Americans Are Fat joke.]) Anyway…low to the ground and in bursts of flapping. Fluttery-fluttery-fluttery- short glide, fluttery-fluttery-fluttery- short glide, fluttery-fluttery-fluttery- short glide, etc.”

Is that laden, or unladen?

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]

[Andoni Goicochea] “I was hoping if you could help me orientating me on how to project using 3 multimedia projectors a video developed in 3072×768. I have a MacPro with 4 dvi outputs, that i would like to use without buying aditional hardware… “

I haven’t used any Mac apps that can split one video across multiple discreet graphics card outputs. You might look into the Matrox TripleHead2Go. It connects to one video output on your Mac, so it appears as a single screen to all playback applications, but it can be configured for three 1024×768 outputs.

Renewed Vision’s ProVideoPlayer explicitly supports the TH2G, and I’ve used Keynote with it countless times. Other playback apps like Playback Pro or Virtual VTR should also be able to use it without any trouble. I believe all these software packages have demo versions available, and the Matrox hardware is really inexpensive, so you should be able to test a couple solutions with only a small investment.

A 3072×768 frame is only about 15% bigger than a 1920×1080 frame, so you shouldn’t have much trouble playing it back from a single machine. That said, I recommend testing your compression workflow and playback.

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]

Congratulations, Todd. You have been a tremendous asset to the After Effects community, and I’m glad to hear that you’ll be working more with end users. Thanks for all your time and effort — it’s greatly appreciated!

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]

[Kemalettin Sert] “which folder holds the images that i saved with this button ??”

Snapshot does not save frames to disk. It holds them in memory so you can compare them with other imagery in separate viewers; see the manual entry on snapshots for more.

Use Save frame if you want to render and export single frames to disk as stills.

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