[Walter Soyka]

See this thread started by Chris Keller. He wrote some great anaglyph stereoscopic scripts for After Effects.

I’ve used them a few times. The workflow is still clunky — AE doesn’t really support stereo — but these scripts are an incredibly well thought-out workaround for this, and they will save you hours and hours of work.

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]

[Kristin Leys] “Umm… why not just shot it on a cellphone?”

Because that’s cheating!

In all seriousness, I’ll play the devil’s advocate with a few good reasons to do this as an effect in post:

• The client might end up wanting a clean version, too (or instead).
• The client might want to repurpose the footage later.
• If any kind of editorial is necessary, I’d rather have shots that intercut consistently, which you can’t guarantee with automatic camera controls.
• If any kind of effects work is necessary, I’d rather do it with clean footage, then dirty it up.

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 question is a refreshing change of direction from the standard, “I shot my movie on my cell phone, how can I make it look like I shot it with a Viper?”

I think that there are three elements that make cell phone video look like cell phone video: the user, the camera, and the compression.

For the user element, you should might strive to flatten your lighting a bit and add a touch of camera shake where appropriate. For the bad camera, hopefully you’ve shot with deep depth of field, and you might add a slight fisheye. For the compression, you could blur and mosaic the chroma to simulate low chroma subsampling; add some sharpening until the image looks decent, then add a bit more; and add some subtle or not-so-subtle macroblocking (mosaic) periodically on areas of high motion.

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]

If you’re using multiprocessing with 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM, you might consider limiting the number of CPUs available to After Effects (see “CPUs to leave for other applications” on this page). This will help you avoid starving your processors of memory.

Also, I usually render to image sequences; if the render fails for any reason, you can re-render the image sequence with the “Skip existing frames” option to pick up where you 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]

[Daniel Schmidt] “I don’t think that time-stretch has that option.”

It does. Read the article I linked to; you must enabled frame blending on best quality for the footage item in the timeline, and you must enable frame blending for the composition, too.

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]

[Daniel Schmidt] “If I use time-stretch, the result is jerky.”

Have you tried setting frame blending to pixel motion?

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]

Glad to hear DT Videolabs was able to help, and thanks for posting your solution back here to the forum.

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]

[Geets Romo] “I was wondering if you know what the loss would be like if I render out R3D with the Animation codec from AE to FC for color correction and do the final render there with ProRes4444?”

The animation codec is 8-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]

If you run Activity Monitor, what happens to the CPU, RAM, and disk usage before and after the render hang? This information will help us know what’s going on when the render seems to stop.

Also, you might be a good candidate for the “Purge every x frames” feature in the Secret menu. Please be aware that mucking with this setting will have a big negative effect on render performance — but I have used it successfully for those times when a slow render is better than no render at all. Don’t forget to reset it when you’re done!

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]

[Brian Charles] “Cinema 4D is very good and available in several flavors depending on your needs.”

Cinema 4D has great, robust integration with After Effects, too.

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