[Walter Soyka]

[Gabriel Delattre] “I need to display for a specific screen a resolution of 3200×600 px”

What’s the final output device and delivery requirements? I’m guessing 4 x 800×600 displays?

[Gabriel Delattre] “But nothing do the job… The video is really jittering (lag). Actually it is quiete smooth but then it has some kind of flickering…. I’ve keep tryed with different video compression: mp4, mov with or without field set…. My computer is a big and strong MACBOOK PRO. I’ve tried to rescale a video in HD to this format and there is no flickering. SO I’m pretty sure it is only my fault. “

You may not be able to adequately test this in real time on your Macbook Pro, because your target display system is so different.

If you do a RAM preview of the comp in AE, is the motion smooth?

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]

Motion graphics is a pretty competitive and saturated field, but you are skilled, design-savvy, personable, and well-connected, there is plenty of work. I think that a strong background in print design could be a great asset.

What sort of work are you doing now? Are you freelance? Could you roll out new services to your existing clients?

If you’re looking to get work from others, you’ll need a great reel. Have you started learning After Effects or Motion to see how you like it?

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 Volkening] “I will mention it (again). It’s not my system- I am a freelancer. (I have 8G on my own system, albeit a mac) The last time I asked for more RAM, I was told Windows XP uses a maximum of 2 Gigs. “

I’m sorry to read about what you have to work with. The XW8000 was state-of-the-art in 2002. And you mentioned it’s running AE v6.5, which was released in 2004.

Windows XP (32-bit edition) can access up to 4 GB of RAM, with some trickery, but that’s a lot of work to put into an 8-year-old dinosaur for a small benefit.

Hopefully, the company that has contracted you will simply replace this with a modern workstation sometime, or recognize that their freelancers may be more efficient on their own machines. Good luck!

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] “You should also understand that AE 10 can utilize 4GB PER CORE”

32-bit AE CS3 and CS4 could address 4 GB per core.

A single instance of 64-bit AE CS5 can address all the RAM in your computer. For long comps in HD, where a single frame weighs in at 7.9 MB, memory goes fast.

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]

[Chuck Pullen] “Just a follow up; I double checked the specs, and I am figuring about 6 -7 frame delay with the switcher frame sync, and the 2 converters”

Plus any processing on the PJ…

Seems like quite a bit of delay until you are able to go to an HD-SDI native solution.

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]

Hit the period key on the numeric keypad to preview audio. The asterisk key will add markers during playback if you wish to mark out the beats.

You can scrub audio by holding the Control key (Command on Mac) while dragging the playhead.

You can view the waveform by hitting LL after selecting the clip with audio in the timeline.

When I need to match something to audio, I usually cut an animatic first in an NLE, then refer back to it by frame number in AE.

Also, make sure the audio isn’t compressed — AE seems to work best with linear PCM audio (WAV or AIF, or wrapped in an AVI or MOV).

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]

[Jeffrey Thayne] “Nested compositions have really simplified my work, because there are many scenes where I animated a block of text, and then I precomposed it, and then animated the entire pre-composition in 3D space. “Collapsing transformations” or “Rasterize continuously” undoes these higher-level animations. However, when the text or sound is 4 or 5 nested compositions deep, the quality of the image/sound becomes intolerable.”

If you do not collapse transformations, AE will treat the nested comp exactly as if it were a piece of rendered footage on your hard drive; it will be a rasterized, 2D plane that you can manipulate in 3D space. As you bring it closer to the camera, it will pixelate exactly like any other raster image would.

If you do collapse transformations, AE treats the pre-comp as if its layers were really in the parent comp — EXCEPT for lights and cameras, which may be why you are losing animation. Also, 2D layers in the midst of a series of 3D layers are like ruptures in the space-time continuum – they’ll break z-depth render order.

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]

Have you enabled frame blending for both the layer and the comp it’s in?

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 A] “Is this a result of q master somehow dividing the job up? we have no problem using the local cluster to make DVDs or other encodes.”

Yes, Qmaster creates numbered files exactly like these when it segments a job.

These temporary files are supposed to be created in the Qmaster storage location, though, not the destination folder. The final step is supposed to be stitching them back together into one file in the destination.

Did it throw any errors in Batch 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]

This is not really a render problem — rendering usually refers to outputting a file via the Render Queue, but technically refers to generating previews as well.

This problem isn’t all that weird, either. When you 0 on the numeric keypad, it starts a RAM preview. When AE runs out of RAM, it stops rendering preview frames and starts playing.

You are running CS5, so the solution is very simple: buy more RAM. After Effects is incredibly memory-intensive, and 6 GB is nothing. I wouldn’t order an AE workstation with less than 16 GB of RAM, and I’d prefer 24 to 32 GB.

Cheaper options including setting RAM preview to skip frames or to preview at reduced resolution; both of these will decrease RAM requirements and extend preview length. You could also close other open applications to make more RAM available to 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