[Walter Soyka]

[Francisco Garcia] “I’ve just been asked to quote for a job of 1 to 3 minutes of this type of animation. I don’t have that much experience quoting, and I’m wondering if any of you professionals could help me out. How much would you charge per minute including the designs and how much would you charge if they provide the designs?”

Please don’t quote per finished minute; it’s a poor substitute for measuring how much of your time and resources the project will actually consume. You will deliver a product, but you are fundamentally selling a process.

I wrote at length about the perils of finished-minute pricing, why clients want finished-minute pricing, and what we can do about it a couple months ago on the Business & Marketing Forum. That entire forum is an amazing resource. Search through there on pricing or setting rates and you will find a wealth of information.

Do you have enough experience to estimate how long this project will take you? Have you calculated what your rate should be (i.e., what are all your expenses, how much can you reasonably expect to work, and what amount of profit should you be making)?

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 can use the Displacement Map effect to get that heat wave look.

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]

Thanks for posting back with your results, Ken — it’s always great to hear what the final solution was.

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]

[Billy Gedney] “Ya- the For-A I’ve chosen has built in Frame Synchronizers Re-sizing Engine on each input. My Concern is purely the converter reliability and latency at this point.”

Gotcha. I have not heard of any reliability issues with either of these lines of converters (until your mention of your colleague’s concerns). I believe there are several users of each of these systems here on the COW, but you might have an easier time finding them in the AJA or BMD forums.

I hope this helps a little…

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 Darius,

We’d need a lot more information about how you engineered your system to be able to help. What switcher were you using, how did you connect the cameras, etc.

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]

[Billy Gedney] “I need to convert from S-video to HD-SDI (Cameras)”

This one looks tricky — going from SD to HD, you don’t just need a converter, but also a scaler. If you’ve chosen a switcher with a built-in scaler (I think some of the For-A switchers have this option), then you may be able to convert the S-Video outs to SDI, and let the switcher upres it (though this will add at least another frame of delay). If not, you’re looking at something more expensive than a simple A/D converter.

[Billy Gedney] “I’ve noticed the AJA converters are cheaper, they look like they’re going to do what I need them to. I have no manufacture preference, but no hands on experience with either of these product lines. Anyone compared the two brands for latency? (I know I cant be too picky- I’m converting every which way, but I want to be mindful of it.)”

I use AJA capture cards, and their support is top-notch. I don’t know off-hand what the delay on their converters is, but if it’s not in the manual, I’m sure support could get back to you with the answer very quickly.

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]

Cool – looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

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]

[John Fitch] “Basicall i’ve got 3 seperate particle systems, two provide particles from impact onto the screen, and a third takes particles and forms text out of them. I’m trying to get it to merge together seamlessly so that it appears that the text forms from the particles from the imapcts.”

In broad strokes: I’d simplify this to two particle systems — one for each impact — and I’d work backwards. They’d both start with a layer-based emitter for your text and animate out. After they have dispersed, I’d use a spherical field with a massive radius and increasing negative strength to suck the particles into the impact point.

Precomp and time-reverse, and it will appear that sparks shoot off from the impacts, fly into to space, and the converge into the logo.

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]

[Marco Romani] “Thomas Leong i rarely found person like you in the other forums!”

Thomas is great — his passion for multi-display really shows in his posts.

I’m sure we’d both love to hear back about how you overcome these challenges.

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]

[Graham Quince] “AE has provided the only way of batch encoding… I have to deal in quantity, far more than quality. “

Check out CS5’s Adobe Media Encoder — you might be able to use this for batch encoding.

If you can step away from WMV to h264 MP4, I’ve been really impressed with both the quality and speed of the Matrox CompressHD expansion card. It does 1080i HD with h264 faster than realtime.

[Graham Quince] “After Effects has always provided not only a good quality, low file-size compression for wmv, but until now (can’t comment on CS4) AE has provided the only way of batch encoding.”

I’m glad to hear you’re seeing good results in your compression; perhaps your footage and workflow is particularly suitable for single-pass encoding. In general, though, I think Dave’s and Michael’s advice is very sound:

AE can do multi-pass encoding when you use File > Export, but that’s only capable of rendering a single comp at time. If you use the Render Queue, you can export many comps at the same time, and with much more control over how AE renders; however, AE is not capable of multi-pass compression through the render queue.

Multi-pass compression makes your encodes look better by analyzing the source footage first, to figure out where the easy-to-compress parts are and where the hard-to-compress parts are. It will then adjust keyframe placement and vary the bit rate accordingly in the second pass. The result is a much cleaner and efficient compression than single-pass is capable of.

Even if you’re getting good results with single-pass encoding, you might get better results with multi-pass encoding: smaller file sizes, sharper video, better motion, reduced artifacts, and reduced banding.

Finally, if you have to deliver multiple different encodes of the same media, using AE to do it will force a time-consuming re-render (from scratch) of your original comp for each target encode, so rendering one intermediate and then encoding from that will actually save 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