[Walter Soyka]

[quincy hall] “My question is: What is the most reliable footage format to use in AE CS3 and Final Cut Pro Studio 2 ? I’ve had this problem with AE: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/947990 In addition I’ve not always been able to import video into final cut until I updated my Quicktime.”

What codec were you using? The problem described in that thread is usually associated with temporally compressed footage, like MPEG2 or H264.

[quincy hall] “I’ve come to the conclusion that your standard jpg encoded .mov is the way to go. Am I right? My software is dated, so I can see my choices are a little limited.”

You could use JPG in Quicktime as you mentioned, but it’s lossy. Animation or PNG codecs (in a Quicktime wrapper) are both lossless, and both preserve transparency.

ProRes might be a good option for you, too — just check out Todd Kopriva’s blog post about preventing gamma shift with ProRes in CS3.

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]

Either you have captured to a FAT32-formatted hard drive, or you have “Limit Capture/Export File Segment Size to” turned on in FCP’s “System settings.”

You can deliver these files to your editor, but you must deliver them all, and you must keep them together. The first file in the set refers to the subsequent files, so if you open the first file, you should see the entire clip in Quicktime and FCP. If you separate the files, that linkage could be broken and your clip will be incomplete.

Working with FCP on a FAT32-formatted drive isn’t recommended; you should be using HFS+ instead.

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]

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Franklin] “What do you mean by audio-follow-video?”

“Audio-follow-video” means that if you have multiple video sources, each with their own audio, the audio is automatically switched when video is. It doesn’t sound like it’s a concern for your setup.

Your video switcher may delay the video a frame or two, so your audio will be slightly ahead of the video. If that’s a problem, you can purchase an audio delay to re-sync audio to video. Unless you’ll be able to see people’s lips moving when they speak, it may not be necessary.

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]

To expand on Dave’s response, not only do you want to avoid using AE for final compression, you should also avoid using compressed media (such as your Xvid AVIs) for subsequent compressions (like MPEG2 for DVD, H264 for web, etc.).

It’s really best to start with a lossless render and handle all your subsequent compression jobs from that original.

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]

Add an item to the Render Queue, click the triangle next to “Render Settings,” and then click “Make template.”

From that screen, you can select what the default render settings are for each render type.

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]

Also, you have to blow up the footage a bit after it’s been stabilized (to keep the edges of the original frame out of sight in the stabilized frame). This will soften the image.

EDIT: Pardon my duplicate thought seconds after yours, Roland — great minds think alike, right?

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 prefer to buy my workstations from an integrator or VAR, because I think even a single support incident will make up the difference in price.

A couple thoughts on the specs you’ve put together:

You’ve specified 8 x 2GB RAM DIMMs; the motherboard you’re looking at is 6-channel (really 2 x 3-channel), so I think you’d be better off adjusting that to either 6 x 4GB or 12 x 2GB. In other words, dual channel RAM performs best installed in pairs, but triple channel RAM performs best installed in sets of three.

If you have specified the GeForce GTX 285 for use with the Mercury Playback Engine, you should be aware that it apparently only accelerates the first 3 layers in a Premiere project; you need a Quadro to accelerate the entire project.

I’d personally also consider a RAID, a video I/O card like an AJA or a Blackmagic and a broadcast monitor to be critical items for most motion graphics/video editing workflows.

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’d only add this to Todd’s comment:

What kind of HD footage are you using in After Effects? If it’s HDV, MPEG4, or similar, you should transcode to another format like Uncompressed, Animation, ProRes, or Quicktime Motion JPEG or PNG. See Dave’s Stock Answer #1 for more:

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]

There are no longer any separate render cards (you might be thinking of the old ICE boards from 10 years ago), and 4 GB with a 4-core processor is not enough for After Effects to use multiprocessing. You want 2 to 4 GB per core, or 8 to 16 GB total.

You might check the Adobe Premiere Pro forum for more information about your Premiere troubles.

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