[Walter Soyka]

AE is a great compositing app, but it’s a lousy compression app. It’s incapable of multi-pass compression, so it doesn’t make very good h.264 media. Your approach of exporting a QT animation movie and then using Compressor is a good workflow.

However, you shouldn’t expect to be able to play a large QT animation file back in real time. It’s meant as an intermediate format (to move imagery between applications without any loss of information). It’s not designed as a playback format, and its data rate requirements are way too huge for most computers to play back in real time, especially in HD. You should import your QT animation into Compressor, make your h.264, and play that.

The animation codec is more efficient when there are large areas of flat color fields. It’s very inefficient for areas with texture (like particles and photos), which might explain why you haven’t run into this before.

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 sounds like you might have rendered the clip itself, instead of the comp you did all your work it.

Otherwise, make sure all the layers are visible (with the eyeball icon in the timeline); AE will render exactly what you see on your screen.

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 much RAM do you have, and what are your multiprocessing settings?

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 Davies] “We are currently battling with out of memory errors and incredible render times working with just 1080i footage and a few graphics. “

That’s because 8 GB of RAM really isn’t very much for multiprocessing with a quad-core machine. Each process can grab up to 4GB, and AE could launch 4 processes on that machine. Turn down the number of processors AE can use, or turn off multiprocessing entirely.

There was a great thread a couple weeks ago where there was some discussion on what workflow adjustments you might make for better performance:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/977291

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]

Check out track mattes — this feature lets you use an image as a 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]

Perhaps you’ve turned off Live Update. Have you tried toggling the Live Update button () right above the timeline?

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]

Compress it, then transcode it back into an usable format for post.

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]

Since this thread is becoming more about how to shoot live music than how to charge for it, I’d encourage you to read through this recent thread (if you haven’t already):

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/158/856046

The big takeaway I’m getting from that thread is that well-produced concert video isn’t a literal reproduction of how the music is made on stage. The good stuff is more expressive, matching the mood of the music, catching the feel of the crowd, and moving the audience through the little details of the performance and the environment to tell a story. If your video is going to be used for promotion, I think this level of production value will be even more important.

Another critical element of the discussion — most concerts are switched live. The director is literally calling the shots over headsets to the camera operators, continually ensuring there’s a good shot to screens or records. (That said, sometimes bad switches happen — you can always record iso’s of the individual cameras if you want to be able to replace a bad switch in post.)

If the budget allows, you could hire a director with some experience to call the show for you. You’d learn a ton on the job, make some money at it, and deliver a stronger video to your client.

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]

MKV, like AVI and QuickTime, is just a container format. It doesn’t actually specify what codec you’re using.

AE doesn’t really like temporally compressed media (see Dave’s Stock Answer #1 quoted below). I think your best bet is to transcode your MKV media to a different container with an intraframe codec. Uncompressed AVI, Quicktime Animation (at 100%) or Quicktime PNG would all be good choices. You could also use an image sequence if your MKV tools don’t write AVI or MOV.

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

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]

After Effects CS4 is a 32-bit application; each instance of AE can only see 4GB of RAM. To use more of your system’s RAM, you need to enable multiprocessing (which launches multiple copies of the After Effects renderer, each of which can address up to 4 GB of RAM). You need 2 to 4 GB of RAM per instance for multiprocessing to be effective.

CS5 is 64-bit only, so a single instance of AE CS5 could address all 8 GB of RAM — but it won’t run on XP64. It requires Vista 64 or Windows 7 64-bit edition.

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