[Walter Soyka]

[Paul Minnaar] “I was at an expo not so long ago and Autodesk had a display there of a BMW advert that had been done mainly in a Hardware/Software package called Flame. When I asked what it cost, I nearly fell on my back. £150,000 or $230,000 or in Rands R1,7 million”

We live in interesting times. There is nothing you can do with a Flame that you can’t do on a desktop system costing about a quarter of the price. There are plenty of things that will be dramatically faster on Flame, but a really complete toolset is well within reach of small studios and busy freelancers.

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’m not a projectionist myself, so hopefully someone else will chime in, and some more information about your requirements would be helpful for them. How big will the screens be? How much room do you have for projector throw? How much ambient light will be in the room? What format video will you be sending from the camera?

Also, will it be the single camera feed only, or do you have to mix in your DVD footage, PowerPoint, etc.?

Finally, I’m sure this is already on your radar, but since you didn’t mention it — don’t forget about audio!

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 don’t know of any off-the-shelf software that can do what you’re asking, but you might look into Apple’s Quartz Composer. It’s a node-based graphics development tool that you could use to develop the effect you’re describing, but there will be a substantial learning curve.

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 believe this is the video you were asking about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WuBpuoPF_g

As Jason and Steve mentioned, there’s a lot of skill and talent required; this is not a canned effect. But don’t take our word for it — check out the article about what work was necessary and what tools were used.

I can’t believe this spot is 4 years old already…

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 could use the Paint Bucket effect on a precomp of your loops to create luma mattes for your materials layers.

Paint Bucket works like the paint bucket tool in Photoshop, but of course you can add keyframes. You could step through your animation a frame at a time pretty quickly, just adding keyframes to the fill point where necessary. Depending on your loops, you might even be able to track 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]

[Julio Ibanez] “Is there a significant quality loss in the PNG output side? These look pretty good to start, despite being H.264, and will need to be acceptable to broadcast once all is said and done.”

Quicktime with a PNG compressor is always mathematically lossless. Quicktime with Animation (and JPEG 2000, I believe) is mathematically lossless at 100%, and lossy at any other value. These codecs all support alpha channels.

Quicktime with Photo-JPEG is mathematically lossy at any quality setting, but may be “visually lossless” (I hate that term!) at very high settings. It has no alpha support.

What’s the next step in your production pipeline with these shots? If you’re going to an FCP edit, ProRes might be your best option. If Avid, DNxHD. Both these codecs are mathematically lossy but visually lossless, and they might be a big improvement for your workflow.

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]

[Andy Joseph] “Also can u please clarify whether ‘After Effects’ is capable of using all 8 cores or not?”

Yes, AE can use all 8 cores. AE can render a single frame on each core at the same time through its multiprocessing feature.

It will not use multiple cores to collaborate on a single frame like a scanline or bucket renderer could.

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] “One of the IT guys here at the station put it this way: “If you have only one copy, you have NO copies”. I’m afraid you found that out the hard way.”

As usual, Dave’s sharing great advice.

Even if you are using Increment and Save, if you’re keeping it all on the same drive, there’s still a single point of failure. Having my files versioned and backed up hourly for me over my network via Time Machine on my Mac gives me a little extra peace of mind.

Gridiron Flow works on Macs and PCs, and it also handles version management (even if you continually save with the same name).

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]

[Brad DeCecco] “Actually this wasn’t the problem, something to do with the length of the clips… anyone?”

They’re related. If FCP is segmenting your files at 2GB, and you are capturing DV25 (13 GB per hour), your clips will be segmented every 9 minutes or so. A clip shorter than 9 minutes would fit in under 2 GB, and it wouldn’t be segmented.

[Brad DeCecco] “Does this effect the quality of the video? I just imported the clips to an external hard drive – is this formatting thing something I can do in disk utility? Should I re-import this stuff or is it of the same quality?”

File segmenting won’t affect the quality of the video.

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]

8 GB of RAM is probably not enough to feed all 8 cores of your computer, so you should either use “CPUs to leave for other applications” to restrict the number of processes AE runs, or disable multiprocessing entirely.

Here are some tips for performance I posted recently:

There isn’t a simple formula for determining what will get you the best performance, because your computer isn’t the only factor; your footage, your effects, and your workflow all impact performance.

As general guidelines for AE performance, I always recommend a system configuration that includes:

• A 64-bit edition of your operating system
• Multiple cores or processors
• Between 2-4 GB of RAM per processor core
• A fast RAID or 3 separate hard drives (one for the OS and apps, one for source footage, and one for renders)
• The most current release of AE (the 9.0.2 update fixes quite a few quirks for AE CS4)

AE doesn’t currently use the GPU, so your graphics card doesn’t impact rendering performance.

I also recommend adjusting your workflow to accommodate AE’s strengths and weaknesses:
Transcoding any interframe-compressed media like MP4 to an intraframe codec before importing
Turning off OpenGL for previews and rendering
Using proxies or pre-renders where appropriate
Use a region of interest where appropriate
Using Shift-RAM preview with lower quality settings than RAM preview for quick takes on your work

Finally, I’d refer to you a couple important links. Todd Kopriva (AE’s documentation lead) has written two important blog posts on performance:

• Performance tip: Don’t starve your software of RAM.
• Performance tip: Don’t overschedule your processors.

And here are some relevant sections from the AE manual itself:

• Improve performance
• Memory & Multiprocessing preferences

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