[Walter Soyka]

As the other posters have mentioned, resolutions of this size are possible with 4K equipment, video or LED walls, or blended projection.

I’d suggest you inquire about the playback system, and find out more about the delivery specs, as there are many variables. Is the pixel space seamless, or are there display bevels or gaps to account for? What frame rate? What container? What codec? A single, full-raster file, or pre-split slices of the image?

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’ve learned a ton from Tim Clapham. He’s done a few classes with FXPHD that were quite good.

MAXON’s Cineversity looks to have some exciting updates coming this year, 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]

[Chris Flannagan] “Hi all, I’m used to using after effects cs3 on a mac, but I recently converted to PC and upgraded to CS4. Anway, I try messing with the memory & processing settings but can’t get AE to use more than 25% of my ram during rendering. I have 4 gigs of ram and an intel centrino 2 core 2 duo p7350 2GHz.

Any ideas how I can get it to use at least 2 gigs? (3 would be ideal)”

What version of Windows are you running? Unless it’s a 64-bit edition, your computer may be limited to accessing 3 GB of RAM, because Windows reserves some extra space for memory-mapped IO.

With dual core machine and only 3 GB of available RAM, I’d probably leave multiprocessing off.

As for memory usage, AE will use what it needs up to the maximum it can address and get from the system. If it’s only using 25% of available RAM, it may not actually need more for your project. If your processor is running at near 100% load during render, but you still have free RAM and the system isn’t swapping memory to disk, then RAM usage isn’t a factor in your render time.

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]

Sorry, Tom, but there are very few book on Cinema 4D. I don’t think that there are any books for the current release (R11.5), which means there are no books that cover the big new dynamics features for MoGraph 2.

I tried learning R10 with a book, but ultimately I found the training videos a lot easier to follow. I don’t think there is anything comparable to the Meyer’s AE books.

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]

[Darby Edelen] “Frame rate will only matter if you’re using film or video assets in your project, otherwise any keyframed animations in one composition will automatically recalculate for any needed frame rate.”

Even if you’re not using video assets, I’d suggest that frame rates always matter. While AE will recalculate your animation at multiple frame rates, from a design perspective, one move might have very different looks in 60i and 24p.

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]

Details sell the shot. There’s no one trick for making a composite work; there are dozens of little ones.

Perhaps the TV has a subtle curvature, perhaps it’s not quite in focus in your camera shot, perhaps there’s a bezel on the TV that you’ll need to mask around, perhaps that bezel will need a light wrap, perhaps the TV should be glowing subtly, perhaps the TV should be casting light on other surfaces in the room, perhaps the glass in the TV is catching highlights, shadows, or reflections from elsewhere in the room…

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]

Playback Pro doesn’t have a free version; without the enabler key, it watermarks the output.

I also think it’s absolutely worth the price. It’s built very well, and has everything you’d need for live playback. If you’re doing a good deal of on-site playback, your rental fee will pay for it very quickly.

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 sorry to see you haven’t gotten any answers to your questions yet. I was hoping someone familiar with the projectors you’re asking about would have responded.

[matt caves] “Optoma HD66 or TX542 or Epson EX71
I am about to buy 3 projectors out of these whats best, what have people been using? I will be doing mostly rear projection and am using a Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition for live event/ club visuals spread out over three projectors. I have a MacBook Pro with an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256 ram. I have tested the Matrox with monitors and that works so I am ready for projectors. LCD or DLP? I’m planning on running HDMI or DVI to the projectors. Needs to be road worthy, bulbs under $300. “

I don’t know either model, but in general I prefer DLP to LCD.

[matt caves] “Also a side question- I am looking to split out the analog video out of the DVI-I (with a y-cable) before the Matrox to monitor video and send to other sources. Will this work? Most discussions on this are unclear on that working. “

I would think that this feature would have to be specifically supported by the graphics card, and I’d be surprised if it worked. My inclination would be to use an active DVI splitter so that you are monitoring the same output that’s going to screen.

If you do test a y-cable, I’d love to hear back about your results.

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’s an old joke that the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. You may use one 2K resolution for digital cinema projection and another for film out.

I think the answer to this question really depends on your deliverables.

AJA has a great overview of 2K.

[Brett Sneed] “If I create a document in Photoshop at 2048×1080, and set a custom aspect ratio to 1.88 (which I believe is 17:9 right?) I get a document that is crazy wide compared to its height and does not at all look like the default Photoshop size”

Pixel aspect ratio is not the same as the frame’s aspect ratio; if you are setting the PAR to 1.88, each pixel will be almost twice as wide as it is tall.

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]

[Brett Sneed] “In other words, I want to know how to set-up an Adobe After Effects or Photoshop document so that I can output a file appropriate for Blu-ray DVD, or for 2K film, or standard NTSC or PAL DVD, etc.”

I’d start at the highest resolution you expect to work in (sounds like 2K), and create scaled-down versions for the other formats. AE has built-in presets for all these resolutions.

I think there are three issues which will be more challenging than frame size.

The first is aspect ratio; you may need to do multiple versions of your design to accommodate the different ratios.

The second is frame rate; an animation that looks smooth at 29.97 frames per second might stutter at 23.976 frames per second. 24p is sometimes truly 24 frames per second, but sometimes it’s 23.976. You may want interlaced and progressive versions.

The third is color management; the formats you’ve listed use different color spaces, so color management will be critical to ensuring consistent output.

Who is doing this post for your project? They should be able to help you sort out what standards you need to target.

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