[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Brockett] “And the trend is that sales of powerful, large desktops, both PCs and Macs, are plummeting over the past three years and will continue to plummet.”

Overall, this may be true — but workstation sales continue to grow, and professional graphics hardware sales are up 77.9% YOY.

[Dan Brockett] “More and more users who used to buy towers are now buying iMacs and laptops. More and more post facilities are going under, I can’t tell you how many I used to use here in LA that no longer exist. It used to be, “why go to a post house, when for $15k, I can have what the post house has here in my office or home?” Now it is evolving to, “why should I have a $15k editi bay in my office or home when I can do most of what is needed on a $2,000.00 iMac or laptop?” It is the next logical step. “

Digital content creation is a really broad market, with many niches within it, and the failing film/broadcast companies in LA is just one piece of the puzzle. More content is being created now than ever before. There are plenty of companies winning new business — someone is buying all this gear — so I think generalizing film/broadcast misses the big shift in our business.

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
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[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Brockett] “At some point, most everything that takes big iron and lots of third party software to accomplish will be able to be done by anyone with a small, portable and cheap device. Moore’s Law still applies and doing almost everything in software will just keep on evolving. Remember ICE cards for your Mac and AE plug-ins? Seems like ancient history but it was only, what, ten years ago?”

Pixar offers a counterexample.

The average render time for a frame of Toy Story (1995) was 2 hours, and tens years later, the average render time for a frame of Cars (2005) was 15 hours — and the Cars renderfarm was 300x more powerful! (https://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/12/pixar_quiz.html)

When Toy Story was re-rendered for 3D in 2009, the average render time per frame was essentially realtime — 1/24th of a second. (https://online.wsj.com/article/SB125201712352284765.html)

I think that Moore’s Law isn’t just transistor count (or speed, or price) — it seems our expectations of what we can do with our technology double every 18 months as well.

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]

[Skylar Weeks] “Thanks for the advice Walter. I am doing some promos for a local tv station. The reason there are so many different videos that need to be placed in the same project or Master comp is that my clients require multiple versions of different lengths. They want 20+ 5sec, 20-10sec, 10-20sec…etc. If I made multiple file versions of each different “version” it would quickly increase the amount of files that I would have to deal with. As I have it now I just wanted to be sure if there was a quicker way or if I was doing it the quickest for the way that I set things up…”

I assumed this is what you were doing. The first two methods I described are quick and dirty, meant to get you to render as quickly as possible if you are under a deadline. I wouldn’t suggest trying to actually maintain a project this way. When multiple versions are required, I maintain the template and re-render versions from scratch as required.

After Effects doesn’t really support what you’re looking to do natively (like a layer set in Photoshop); at some point, you have to duplicate the comp if you want to batch render.

The last option I mentioned, CompsFromSpreadsheet, is a script that will allow you to use a spreadsheet to control not only text inserts, but also what footage goes into a layer. You may need to flatten out your comp structure some (I don’t remember off hand if it handles sub-comp hierarchies or not), but this is a great tool for quickly generating versioned comps from a template.

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]

How does it look in realtime RAM preview in AE? If it’s smooth there, then perhaps it is a playback problem. If it’s jumpy in RAM preview, then I’d think the render from Max is suspect.

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]

[Skylar Weeks] “That would work, but for my situation that wouldn’t be ideal… you see I am using a MASTER comp. that has 2-3 precomps inside it. Those precomps called “drop 1 & 2 (respectively)” each have 20 different video clips within them. So, for example, I currently have to pick video clip #5 from Drop Spot precomp 1 and then go to Drop spot #2 and pick video clip #5 as well. Then i go back to the Master comp/template and those videos show up in the placement where I want them to be. I then have to render out those settings and clip picks at that time”

I have a few suggestions for versioning; for all of them, I’d suggest pre-rendering or high-quality proxying everything you can to improve render speeds.

First, a couple quick and dirty ideas:

There’s a script called True Comp Duplicator which will not only duplicate a comp, but its entire dependency hierarchy as well. If you used it on your “MASTER” comp, it would create not only a “MASTER 2” comp, but a “Drop 3” (independent duplicate of Drop 1) comp and “Drop 4” (independent duplicate of Drop 2), etc.

Your second choice that I see is to create a separate project file for each variation. In each, give the MASTER comp a meaningful name, but include the word MASTER. You may have MASTER A, MASTER B, MASTER C, etc.

Don’t worry about setting up the renders at this point; just get the MASTER comp looking right, name it appropriately, Save As, and repeat as necessary until you have one project file per variation.

Create a new project, and import each of those other projects. Use the renderNamedItems.jsx script (included with AE) to add all comps with the string “MASTER” in them to the render queue.

A cleaner and more elegant method, if you have the time and the will to re-engineer your comps and project structure: the CompsFromSpreadsheet script.

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]

Select the composition that you want to proxy in the Project tab. Right-click, then Set proxy > File…

Select the first PSD in the image sequence, and make sure that the “Photoshop Sequence” checkbox in the lower right corner is ticked.

You will now see a square next to the comp in the Project window indicating that there’s a proxy in use. You can click this on and off to toggle.

When you render your final comp, make sure that you go into Render Settings in the Render Queue and change Proxy Use from the default “Use no proxies” to “Use comp proxies only” (or “Use all proxies” if you have proxied footage as well).

There’s a lot more information on this in the Placeholders and proxies section of the manual.

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]

NTSC video is really 29.97 frames per second, not 30. AE’s NTSC-based composition presets use 29.97 fps, but the default frame rate for image sequence imports is 30 fps. Can you verify that your footage and composition frame rates match?

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]

You could use an NLE like Premiere or Final Cut Pro to edit your rendered clips.

To keep it all in AE, I’ll point you to some relevant resources in the AE documentation that might help you accomplish what you’re looking for.

If you have a comp to render in AE, and if you have precomps within it, you could pre-render or proxy the precomps, then render them. AE will use the rendered files instead of the precomps wherever else they appear in your project. They will not need to be re-rendered from scratch for output; instead, they’ll be read back from disk.

If you use proxies, be sure to set them for best quality before rendering the proxies. Also be sure to set your final renders to use proxies.

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]

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to answer Dan’s question; I was just trying to point out that the question is valid, because JPEG2000 supports multiple color spaces. Dan, beyond the question of color space, the question of chroma subsampling will also be valid. If the file is component, it could be 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.

[Rafael Amador] “I don’t see the RGB color space.”

I didn’t see it in the Wikipedia article, either — but I think the Wikipedia article is incomplete. The Wikipedia article on DCI describes JPEG2000 compression with an XYZ color space. If you look at p. 11 of the PDF I linked to earlier, (https://jpeg.org/public/DCINEMA-v2.pdf) you’ll see other color spaces mentioned. Some of the color space may only availabe in extensions of the JPEG2000 standard and not in the baseline standard.

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]

JPEG2000 supports multiple color spaces, including YUV (specified as sRGB-YCC, with 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 chroma subsampling), XYZ, and RGB color spaces. See https://jpeg.org/public/DCINEMA-v2.pdf for more.

I think that which color spaces are available depends on which parts of the JPEG2000 standard the encoder complies with.

As noted in the Wikipedia article, JPEG2000 is capable of completely reversible RGB-component transformations.

I’ve only done a little work with JPEG2000, so any clarifications or corrections are 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