[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Wright] “”Name Your Own Price” can also be $0. “

The suggested price is only $10. That seems more than reasonable for a script that will save hours of 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

[Walter Soyka]

[Ole Jessien] “Just as suggested my current workflow is to first do a default render and then take it through AE CS4 for the WMV export (which btw allows me all the multipass settings etc. that I want). “

True; File > Export will let you do multi-pass, but you lose all the control you get over your render with the Render Queue, which is why most workflows use intermediates and a third-party compression application.

I’m glad to hear you’ve found a workflow that’s working for you, though, and thanks for posting back with your workaround! I’m sure that this will be an issue for many in the coming months.

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]

[Arvin Bautista] “It doesn’t scale very easily (it’s yet another precomp I need to remember to make that’s unique to each render, and if the durations were to change I’d have to remember to change the length of the enclosing comp as well)”

True! How about File > Scripts > renderNamedItems.jsx?

That script will prompt you for a string to match, and it will add all comps that include that string to the render queue. So if you added “_RENDER” to the name of all your output comps, you could run the script, and tell it to look for “_RENDER.” It’ll catch everything, no matter where in your project it is. Much, much cleaner than my first suggestion.

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]

[Arvin Bautista] “The comps themselves are located within their own folders (organizationally I couldn’t just keep them all in one folder), and to me doing batch selecting opened me up to the risk of accidentally missing something.”

How about leaving your project’s organization intact, but pre-comping all of the comps you need to render and placing them in a separate “render” folder? They’d still reflect whatever changes you made in the actual comps, and you’d have quick and easy selection for render.

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]

All 720-line HD formats are progressive; there is no such thing as 720i. You can safely assume that the footage is progressive.

You cannot safely assume that the true frame rate is 59.94 fps, though. It could also be 29.97 fps (doubled) or 23.976 fps (with something like 3:2 pulldown, just across entire frames instead of fields). If you step through the footage frame by frame, it should be pretty clear.

If the footage is truly 59.94 fps, you might preserve some of the motion by compressing to 29.97 interlaced fps. If it’s 23.976, you can reverse-telecine and compress at 23.976 fps.

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 an answer to your question, but the workflow that Todd is suggesting (render to intermediate lossless, compress that to WMV) will likely give you better results. WMV benefits from multi-pass encoding, but AE is only capable of single-pass.

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 design for widescreen systems like this very often.

You could use cameras as Ted mentions, but I prefer to create one large master comp (20480×768), and then a series of output comps (1024×768) with the master comp re-positioned appropriately for each display segment. (The playback system requirements will determine your output requirements.)

My suggestions for working with huge pixel spaces like this: loads of RAM, CS5, and workflow adjustments like proxies/pre-rendering, Shift-RAM preview with very low quality settings, and region of interest rendering.

Widescreen render times can be shocking if you are used to SD or HD render times. You might do some tests upfront to get an idea of what your final render times will be like and build it into your schedule.

I’d also render to image sequences instead of Quicktime movies. The raster size won’t cause problems, and if your render fails for any reason, you’ll be able to resume the render of an image sequence where it left 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]

The BBC agrees with Adobe — they have specified 16:9 as 1050×576 square pixels.

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]

A very relevant thread just popped up in the Business & Marketing forum:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/17/870348

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]

It looks like there’s a drop shadow layer style on your text layer — is that the softening you’re talking about?

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