[Walter Soyka]

Assuming you don’t have any other project or pipeline management in place — or a human to act as the coordinator — you might consider sharing a Google Docs spreadsheet (or similar) among all your artists, with rows for assets and columns for your AE projects. Add an extra column up front for the current version number of assets.

The version number in the current asset version column is updated by the artist responsible for the asset. Any time an AE artist uses an asset in their project, they update that cell for that asset in their column with the version number they’ve used. This will let the asset artists see where the assets are being used (and who to notify for updates), and let the AE artists see the status of all the assets they’ve used in their project.

The downside — everybody needs to participate consistently, or else it’s worthless. This is far from a perfect solution, but it’s a quick and dirty way to keep everyone on the same page.

On the technical side, I think that using proxies (stored locally) from the networked assets is a good approach. There are a couple scripts for AE that allow you to create proxies for multiple items with just a few clicks.

Also, if your network is really slow, a networked watch folder render will be slow.

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]

[Kevin Camp] “i don’t know of an effect that will create a mosaic with triangles…”

Could you fake it with CC Pixel Polly, using polygons instead of textured polygons?

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’ll second Todd’s advice on pre-rendering and using proxies. Also, make sure you keep multiprocessing turned off in AE, and quit every other open application that you can.

Is getting more RAM an option? I’d think upgrading, even to 4 GB, would be a noticeable improvement.

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 Business & Marketing forum might be a good place to try — questions like this come up pretty often there.

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]

[Alexey Bobrovsky] “They somehow coped with that problem, but forgot to keep me informed. And they also are unable to explain what did they do and what was all about. They can’t even tell me the model of their editing card :-))”

I’d agree with Dave — I’ll bet the problem was on their end. My wild guess with no other information is that they accidentally swapped the two chrominance cables from the I/O card to the monitor.

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 kresling] “In the Activity Monitor I see six cores alternately using between 0 & 135% of the CPU.”

What about RAM usage?

[matt kresling] “I may be imagining it, but it feels as if big renders start like a bullet and then bog down over time, regardless of the content. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a delusion, however–that’s what happens when you stare at a little yellow bar for 10 hours. “

Many of my projects build over time, so the beginning may start out simply, but the middle or the end has a lot going on — more layers, more effects, more particles, more moblur. The render time estimate doesn’t take this variable complexity into account. From the best I can tell, it estimates the render as if each frame remaining will take as long to render as the last completed frame did.

But Dave’s point is right on — the content DOES matter. AE is really built for intraframe media; if you use any interframe-compressed media, you’ll get all kinds of unexpected results. What sort of footage are you using?

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]

[Nico Jones] “So to be more specific then, I’m looking to achieve a sci-fi effect. Glowing, almost blown out whites giving an eerie, incandescent feel.”

Try working in 32bpc — this will really change the looks of your blurs and glows. Andrew Kramer has a good intro to 32bpc and HDR here on the COW; here’s another tutorial he’s done with an effect you might be able to use.

You just have to be careful about using effects that work in 32bpc; an 8-bit effect will throw out your high dynamic range.

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 think that your budget is pretty tight for two Xeons and enough RAM to keep them busy. I don’t think there’s any sense right now in buying 8 cores for AE unless you can also buy 16-32 GB of RAM, or 4 cores unless you can also buy 8-16 GB of RAM.

I would actually postpone the purchase of a new workstation for After Effects for at least a couple weeks — Adobe is announcing AE CS5 on April 12 (though they will not release it for some time after that) — and I’ll be curious to see what the system requirements and recommendations are.

At a minimum, remember that CS5 will be 64-bit only.

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 loves RAM. If you’ve got between 2-4 GB of RAM per processor core, you can enable multiprocessing to see a big performance improvement. If you have less than 2-4 GB per core, you run the risk of memory starvation and huge slowdowns.

In other words, if AE is your primary application, prioritize RAM in your purchase. I’d rather have a 4-core machine with 16 GB of RAM than an 8-core machine with 8 GB of RAM.

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]

What do you see in Activity Monitor as the render progresses in the CPU usage and system memory usage tabs?

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