[Walter Soyka]

What assets do you already have — clean plates of the before characters, the after characters, and the background? Or must you transition completely from one shot to another?

In addition to Michael’s suggestion, you might try adding some swirly particle systems and glowing, smeary fractal noise. Using multiple layers and effects will help you build in some complexity that will make the effect feel more organic and real.

On the compositing side, don’t forget that all this light you’re creating should influence the environment around it, too.

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]

[Duane Giliam] “Im just concerned because I see alot of guys on the forums having issues with open GL.Is Open Gl to do with the GPU or the CPU? “

Even with CS5, the graphics card has relatively little impact on After Effects. AE generally renders on the CPU, not the GPU. The Quadro will impact Premiere Pro’s performance a lot more than it will impact AE’s performance.

You are right that many have had issues with OpenGL rendering, and even people with Adobe recommend leaving it OpenGL accleration off for rendering. The OpenGL – Interactive setting accelerates your viewport during user interactions like scrubbing the timeline and moving layers, but not during actual preview or render, and it’s pretty widely considered safe and reliable.

There are some effects that are capable of GPU-accelerated rendering, and these may be accelerated nicely by the Quadro. This has nothing to do with AE’s OpenGL rendering, which you can safely leave off.

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]

As usual, I agree with Michael (and Dave by proxy) about using separate encoding tools.

However, this might answer your original question: apparently, 64-bit AE CS5 cannot directly use 32-bit Quicktime for exports. See these two posts from Todd Kopriva for more:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/979352

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/979363

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 would use Dataton Watchout for this; others on this forum might also use AVStumpfl Wings.
In either case, you will be shocked by the price if you are on a VLC budget. You might look into renting license keys instead of purchasing them.

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]

The 2006 Mac Pro uses EFI32, which really limits your graphics card options. In addition to ATI’s 1900 XT, the ATI Radeon 3870 is supposedly backwards compatible with your Mac Pro 1.1 model. Apple released a custom NVIDIA 8800 GT for the 2006 Mac Pro, but good luck finding one.

The 2008 models use EFI64, and have much broader compatibility.

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]

Or see this recent thread about using an Alpha Only output module if you’re looking for a B&W mask.

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]

[matt gosciminski] “would you say that quicktime codecs work better with premiere pro as well? im having some trouble getting video to play back smoothly”

The animation codec is an “intermediate codec.” It’s completely lossless, but the data rate is astronomical. Most computers can’t play it back smoothly.

Other software developers have developed “visually lossless” codecs that preserve nearly all visual information at manageable data rates. Final Cut Pro has ProRes, and Avid has DNxHD.

Premiere Pro doesn’t have a native accelerated codec. I think a lot of Premiere editors are using Cineform (a 3rd party, realtime HD codec), but you will almost assuredly get a better answer on this on the Premiere Pro forum.

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]

[Brett Lewis] “The problem exists in AE CS5 and Quicktime itself. in quicktime the error reported is Error -43 “

I think Quicktime throws Error -43 for permissions issues or illegal characters in a filename.

Do you have write access in the folder you’re trying to save to? Any funny characters, international characters, or punctuation marks in the name of the drive, any of the folders in the path, or the filename itself?

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]

When you import these files, does it create anything in your Conformed Media Cache folder?

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]

[Von Thomas] “I have a need to shoot some ad shots in vertical orientation, and all is fine until I try to edit my vertical footage in FCP.”

What’s your deliverable need to be? If this will ultimately be played on a rotated monitor, you will probably be expected to deliver standard video.

I’d pre-rotate and export pillarboxed selects into a standard raster, use those for editing, then re-connect to the original media for effects, color grading, and final delivery.

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