[Walter Soyka]

I recently pointed another poster to CompsFromSpreadsheet — a script that uses tab-delimited files to drive text inserts and footage inserts.

Separately, AE has a render and email script that ships with the program.

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]

[doug nash] “Thanks. I’ve been posting, at length, on both C4D Cafe & CG Talk about the 3D end of things. I’m fairly squared away there, but the AfterEffects workflow is where I need additional input. I figured this would be good, in that it’s specifically AE, but I’ll start a thread over in the stereoscopic forum, as wel”

I’ve done a couple tests in stereo with After Effects (mainly using Chris Keller’s outstanding stereoscopic scripts), but without native stereo support in the application, I’ve found the whole process a bit cumbersome. I’ve just started evaluating Nuke specifically for its native stereoscopic support, but of course there’s a substantial learning curve.

Doug, would you mind posting back here when you find a solution? I’d be very interested in seeing how you resolve this in 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]

Any good font will include accented versions of the letters.

Here’s a support doc for adding accents to characters on Mac OS X; here’s one for adding accents to characters on Windows XP and later.

Just a note with French — the accent aigu and the accent grave look similar, but have different uses, so take care when transcribing.

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]

[Tommy Nielsen] “I have to make a presentation with 1500 images and 2 films, on to
screens with individual timeline and one backgrund sound.
For a 75 min comedy travel show.”

Can you elaborate a little more on what you mean by “screens with individual timeline and one background sound?”

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]

[Dan Brockett] “If we are all aware of the fact that computing is migrating to the cloud and not owning giant and ever more advanced Mac Pro and other PC brand workstations, then why did many of the posts in this thread disagree with this assertation when I posted it? Have you edited over the web? Used Sohonet, Aspera software or any of the latest AVID remote workflow gear? This is the direction of our business, it is there for anyone to see, just go to NAB, read the magazines and websites. “

I mentioned earlier in this thread that cloud computing could be the future in production, but I still think it’s a long way off.

There’s a race: local processing power and storage are competing with cloud-based processing and bandwidth to meet our increasing expectations and our decreasing budgets. I think that we will need a quantum leap in broadband speed before I will be able to replace my local machines with the cloud. My RAID runs at 500 MB/s; my Internet connection has a long way to go to catch up. There’s a tremendous amount of physical infrastructure that will need to be built (at great expense) before I think it’s realistic to move video to the cloud.

[Dan Brockett] “BTW, enlighten me, what exactly is BMDs USB 3.0 tech and what does it have to do with CPU or graphics processing power? “

I imagine Illya was referring to new products like the Ultra Studio Pro. It’s a 10-bit SD/HD capture solution that connects via USB 3.0 — meaning you could work on a notebook instead of a big workstation with a capture card.

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 Roberts] “Thanks for the tips, Walter. Good stuff. “

Thanks, Steve — they are all hard-won and production-tested. I hope they’re helpful!

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 Doug,

I don’t have an answer for this question, but the COW also has Cinema 4D and Stereoscopic 3D forums; perhaps someone there would have some direct experience.

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]

[Kevin Sio] “I have a HP XW8600-dual quad core 3.00 GHz processor-4G RAM-1 TB internal esata drive-16 GB external RAID-graphics card is NVIDIA Quado FX 3700. “

With that amount of RAM, I would keep multiprocessing off. Turning multiprocessing on with 8 cores and only 4 GB of RAM practically guarantees RAM starvation and massive slowdowns.

The rule of thumb for RAM requirements with multiprocessing is is 2-4 GB per core (keeping in mind that the OS and any other open applications will also use RAM), and a 64-bit operating system. Your eight-core system would benefit from 16 to 32 GB of RAM.

[Kevin Sio] “I haven’t done too much work with it yet but I find it to be very sluggish, especially when changing size and position of a layer.”

You might try enabling OpenGL for interactions only — setting OpenGL to “Always on” is not recommended — and under no circumstances should you ever render with OpenGL.

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 been thinking about our exchange yesterday, and I might be arguing for the faster horse-drawn buggies at the dawn of the automobile. What I should be arguing is that progress will continue, whatever form it may take.

Earlier this week, I was working on-site with a client and made some edits to a render-heavy particle system on my laptop. I uploaded the project from my laptop to my workstation, rendered it back at the office, and downloaded the final render files; the project was complex enough and short enough that it was faster to download than it was to render locally.

Taking this a step further, I don’t know how long we will have workstations on our desk. Perhaps bandwidth will increase enough that I can ditch my workstation and do all my heavy lifting with rented computer time from Amazon. For the foreseeable future, I will still need my AJA card and my RAID, so no iMac for me, but you’re right to suggest that the technological climate could change as much as I’ve been suggesting the business climate is.

I don’t know specifically what the future will bring, but to get back to my original point, I’m confident in saying that I will have continually more computational power at my disposal, and that I will continue to find ways to use it to serve my clients better.

Thanks for an interesting discussion! Cheers,

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]

Dan Brockett: “I don’t feel that market statistics are currently very relevant for the exact reason listed above. We are barely, sort of, kind of coming out from the worst economy since the Great Depression so same quarter sales and sales growth are not a realistic indicator of where the market is really headed. When you had the most horrible year in your recorded computer sales history, any growth from the dismal numbers last year will look impressive.”

I’d absolutely agree with you that this year may be an outlier in sales. Also, many of these workstation sales are going for CAD, engineering, medicine, science, visualization, etc.

However, even if it’s hangover demand from the recession, it’s still demand, and the total workstation market is still large – several billion dollars. Apple may eventually decide to focus on consumers exclusively, but I don’t expect the entire workstation market to disappear. Like another poster in this thread mentioned: as long as there’s a need, someone will produce power on the desktop.

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