[Walter Soyka]

[Richard Dolesh] “Okay, that being said, I really only am concerned about the cameras. I researched 3 ‘toy’ cameras and found the Kodak Zi8 (SD card/various framerates/sizes/ext mic) But it records in the Kodak Zi8 ‘.3ivx’ format which sounds like a major hassle converting. I’m starting to think about buying 2 more EOS 7d’s, sure it would be $2800 (2 body’s and a 55mm lens for each)but I could sell 1 of them on ebay afterwards when production wraps, and maybe keep the other as a backup/2nd camera if I can afford. Or any other modest camera ideas? I was thinking about a LUMIX as some of the models have inter-frame compression (easier to edit) as I don’t need state of the art HD.”

You could rent the cameras instead of purchasing them outright, which will open up a whole new class of camera for your budget. You’ll just want to allocate plenty of time for testing the perspective on your rig.

Kodak’s site says the Zi8 records h.264-encoded MOVs. Conversion to an intraframe codec should be painless.

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] “I wonder what sort of application would use and more importantly, be able to reconstruct the data from such a file? “

The only real use for raw YUV that I can think of is as an intermediate format between special-purpose, naive, or homebrew tools.

It’s trivially easy to read or write raw YUV data, but think of the disadvantages of not including the metadata with the data itself — if you don’t also know the frame size and frame rate, there’s no way to determine it from the data itself! This is all exactly why we started using container-based formats in the first place. But hey — at least it’s intraframe!

Tarquin, I think we’d both love to hear more about your requirements for our own edification and future reference.

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] “Are you absolutely, positively sure about this? I could find NOTHING concering a .yuv extension, which in this case would be some sort of media container like .mov and .avi. “

.YUV is the opposite of a container — it’s just the raw data. No time code, no color space, no information about frame rate or raster size — just a raw dump of the data.

It can be planar (all the Y for a single frame, then all the U, then all the V) or packed (YUV for each pixel).

To the original poster, I think FFmpeg can output planar YUV. I’m not sure if it includes a header or not, but it might be worth checking out.

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]

[Tarquin Douglas] “I have a 10 bit uncompressed AVI captured in on Premiere Black Magic at 23.98, 1920×1080. I need to trasncode this to a YUV420-RAW Data file. NoHeaderFile with a .yuv extension. I know Carbon Coder can do this but does anyone know if After Effects can handle this?”

.YUV is neither on the list of supported input formats nor supported output formats.

After Effects could work with the uncompressed AVI if you install the Black Magic codec.

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]

[Mitch Hardison] “I am using 1.5.1 and I do not see a render setting.”

On Particular 1.5, it was called “Render mode.” I don’t remember what the default was.

Here’s some documentation on depth of field with Trapcode 1.5. What I said before about particle type still applies; make sure that your particle type doesn’t say “No DOF.”

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]

[Richard Dolesh] “Interesting thought about working in the NLE first. I never thought of it that way… Knowing how Premiere Pro is…I’d still probably prefer, for creative flexibility to just stick in AE and really make the most of draft mode/ shrinking down the size. I guess you could make a custom project (720 x 3840 or so) in PPro though…I may have to try that.”

I agree with Gary — an NLE offline followed by an AE online will be a huge timesaver. I’m a FCP guy, too, but I’d think the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro CS5 would be perfect for multi-screen editorial.

Gary also mentioned using proxies with AE — and that is great advice and will be a huge timesaver. I also recommend using RAM preview and Shift-RAM preview; I use RAM preview for high-quality previews to judge fine detail, and Shift-RAM preview for low-res previews with skipped frames to judge gross movement.

AE CS5 is supposed to be better with interframe compression like the cheap cameras use, but I would still recommend transcoding to a lightweight, intraframe-compressed codec to lighten the load on your processors while working in AE.

You haven’t mentioned anything about your system, but the more RAM you have, the happier you’ll be. Larger-than-HD comps burn through RAM very, very quickly.

[Richard Dolesh] “Considering 3 cheap/HD 720 cams mounted horizontally on a tripod… Playback: So far I am thinking of: Master Computer with 3 Brightsign HD210’s for playback and sync onto three 42″ LCD panels arranged horizontally (with 3-4 inches between)”

I think that the hardest part of your project is going to be making the cameras’ perspectives match the displays as you intend. I’d budget time for testing.

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] “”error could not open psd because it is not a valid photoshop document” this is what comes up when it comes to a specific psd file even if i get rid of it or even a few of the revious files. so when it does the rendering again it stops again on this specified file even though its not there. “

Let me make sure I understand you — please correct anything here if I’m wrong. I assume that you are rendering a PSD sequence to use a proxy, and when it tries to reimport, you get this error. I also assume you have found which of the files are corrupt and deleted them, and now you are trying to get AE to re-render the missing (corrupt and deleted) frames, but it’s stopping before it gets to them.

If you have a folder that contains the good frames of your image sequence, you can add your comp to the render queue, set it for Multi-Machine Settings and Multi-Machine Sequence, point it at the folder which contains the rest of your image sequence, and render. This will skip existing frames, and render everything within the comp’s work area. If the render is stopping too early, make sure that the work area matches what you need rendered, or set the time span to “Length of Comp” in Render Settings if you want to make sure you’re rendering the whole thing.

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] “We have done multi-machine renders with After Effects CS5 with ONE comp and it’s been fine. However, we have tried a multi-machine render with MULTIPLE comps and have set everything up fine. What we are noticing is that after a few render’s with some of the comps, some of the machines tend to lose sync and the watch folder window keeps looking for the project to continue to the next comp? “

I haven’t done a multi-machine render with CS5 yet, so I can’t help with this if the issue is specific to CS5. My general advice for multi-machine renders:

• Check that all comps are set for multi-machine render and output
• Check that all the required footage has been collected to shared storage
• Check that all permissions are set properly
• Check that all required fonts and plugins are installed on all machines.

Also, reviewing the log file may yield some clues as to what’s going wrong.

[jason friedrich] “What can we do POST-render to automate the re-assemble of a PNG sequence back to an AVI or MPG?”

1. Nest your multi-machine render comp (let’s call this “MAIN”) within a new comp (“MAIN Output”) by dragging it in the Project pane onto the new comp button.
2. Add both “MAIN” and “MAIN Output” to the render queue, and make sure that “MAIN” comes before “MAIN Output.”
3. Set “MAIN” for multi-machine rendering as you normally would, but set a post-render action of “Import & Replace Usage.” This creates a chain of dependent render items; the footage in “MAIN Output” will be the image sequence from the multi-machine render of “MAIN.”
4. Set “MAIN Output” for whatever render settings and output module you’d like, but keep in mind that AE’s render queue is not capable of multi-pass encoding, so you’re better off with intraframe-compressed MOVs or AVIs.
5. Collect and render. All working nodes will collaborate on the “MAIN” render. When “MAIN” is done, one of the machines should pick up “MAIN Output” and write out the movie file. Please note that if your comp has audio, you need to handle that separately, as it won’t come through with the image sequence. You could render and re-import your audio into “MAIN Output” ahead of time.

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]

Particle types “glow sphere” and “star” do not support depth of field. Also, in Particular’s effect controls, Render Settings > Depth of Field should be set to “Camera Settings.”

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]

[Jon Iverson] “The bird does move across a fair portion of the 1080p screen, so the search region is rather large and encompasses 3/4 of the screen area, with the feature region being much smaller. Since the bird moves unpredictably, I didn’t know if there was any other way to proceed or if there was a way to speed up tracking time.”

The search area doesn’t need to cover anywhere in the frame the bird might be at any time; it just needs to cover how much the bird might move from one frame to the next. In other words, as the track proceeds, the search area moves with the feature. Your tracking speed will increase as you tighten the search area.

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