[Walter Soyka]

I’m not sure I understand the workflow you’re looking for. Are you expecting to do your VFX as a part of the offline, and then somehow conform them back to the high-res media automatically?

In general, single shots are kicked out of the NLE, sent to VFX, and brought back into the NLE before color correction as part of the online.

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 gave you a comprehensive answer with the most common causes of your exact problem — I’m sure you saw in your research how often these answers help. Mentioning that you had already ruled these things out would have been a big help in trying to answer your problem.

As it is, we still don’t really have enough information to help.

Does the render hang at a particular frame, or is it different every time? If you run Activity Monitor, what happens to the CPU, RAM, and disk usage before and after the render hang? Have you tried rendering to an image sequence? If it hangs when rendering an image sequence, what happens if you re-render the image sequence with “Skip existing frames” checked?

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]

Most media for concerts is played from media servers like Hippotizer or Pandora’s Box, and controlled from the lighting board.

[Christopher Walker] “What would be a great video-presentation software to go with? I need something that is streamlined (organizable, good run lists.), HD compatible, and has the capabilities of multiple/surround sound audio selection. I have thus far looked into programs such as Pro Video Player from Renewed Vision. and Playback Pro from DT Video Labs. “

These are both good products.

I’ve never tried to use multi-channel audio with either product. You might try contacting both developers and asking them about multi-channel audio; I think you’ll find they’re both very responsive.

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 curious as to why you would want to do your edit in After Effects.

I’d do the edit in a real NLE (FCP, Avid, etc.), effects shots in AE, and then bring those shots back into the NLE so it can manage the conform.

There was a good thread on this workflow in the Art of the Edit forum a couple weeks ago.

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 use proxies of my precomps (rendered at full res as image sequences) very heavily when I work on widescreen and multi-screen projects. For final renders, this changes the burden from the processors and RAM to the disk subsystem, so I have a fast RAID.

For example, rather than recompute a glow effect on my background precomp just because I changed a foreground text element and needed to re-render, proxying the background precomp lets me render the glow once and simply read it back from disk for subsequent renders.

Using image sequences lets me only re-render changed parts of compositions instead of re-rendering the entire piece for small tweaks.

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]

Unfortunately, we don’t generally see a lot of posts on audio here; you might get some better feedback (pun absolutely intended) on the Audio Professionals 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]

True. You could also jump directly to the time, or place the keyframes on the last frame and drag them one frame forward.

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]

Hi Mike,

Sorry we were never able to catch up in Phoenix last year; I’ll drop you a line when I’m back there in a couple months.

I think that this can be done; I did some design work for a show like this before the new DP TH2G was announced, if I recall correctly, the operator was using new MBPs. This post also suggests that it works.

If you won’t be able to test it yourself, let me know, and I’ll try to arrange a test later this week.

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]

Loops stutter when a frame is repeated. To avoid that stutter, you have to keyframe such that the last frame leads seamlessly back into the first frame. For example, if you are animating a rotation from 0 to 360 degrees and you want it to loop, the rotation on the very first frame of the comp should be keyframed at 0. The frame AFTER the last frame of the comp must be keyframed to 360 (or 1x). Just hit End to jump to the last frame, then Page Down to advance one frame beyond it.

If you keyframe the last frame of the comp instead of the frame after it, then the loop will appear to stutter, because the last frame will match the first frame (both will have a rotation of 0/360 degrees), and the loop will seem to momentarily pause when they are played back to back.

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]

Instead of using Crop on output, you could create a series of 1920×1080 compositions, one for each Watchout display, each of which contains only your main 5300×1080 comp, repositioned to re-create the crops.

However, I recommend against going directly to WMV from After Effects. AE is incapable of multi-pass compression, which creates cleaner output. I always render to a lossless format and then handle compression in a third-party application.

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