[Walter Soyka]

You’ve got Draft 3D turned on. Click the little button above the timeline with the cube and light icon to toggle it back off.

Draft 3D disables lights and other 3D features so your scene previews faster while you 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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Can you post a screen shot showing your comp and AE user interface?

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]

Have you seen the documentation on these items?

RAM and Disk Caches

The Media Cache

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]

Apple menu > System Preferences > Display

Choose a low resolution for your display, then set it back to the original resolution.

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]

[Jimmy Brunger] “Thanks for your suggestions. That could well work in some cases, but the resolution is 7000 x 800 and multiple RGB+A TGA sequences stacked up in a half hour comp would be a huge amount of data to store/move around. I’m not sure how much time it would save me either tbh. Hey ho! “

I do a lot of ultra-widescreen projects at similar resolutions, and you’re right — the data requirements for proxies are huge, both in terms of size and speed. I bought a big RAID array specifically for a proxy-based workflow.

Just like you, I’m looking forward to AE CS5…

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 Holson] “In the tutorial, as soon as he creates the light layer the “floor” layer disappears and you can see the light and the light changes color to what was selected. Mine does not do that.”

The floor layer must be 3D, and if you have any 2D layers in the mix, it can break the 3D render order.

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 is a really vexing problem. I can’t seem to replicate the behavior here.

Do you have OpenGL turned on or 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]

[Darrel Harrison] “It actually writes 100 place holder files and after it writes the first 2g file names the next one “-1”, then “-2″ etc. When you stop the capture the unused files are deleted.”

I think that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen; FCP will write multiple files, but it should treat it all as one clip in the Browser.

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 consider making lossless proxies of your precomps (or pre-rendering them) which contain non-multiprocessing effects. It will use a single processor to create the proxy, but previews and subsequent renders will be able to use the footage instead of re-rendering each frame. Make sure to enable proxy use in the render settings of subsequent renders.

Also, Nucleo Pro 2 supports CS4 now, if you wanted to use it.

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]

Can you work around the problem by limiting the Capture/Export file segment size in FCP’s scratch disk settings?

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