[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Roth] “why when AE starts up does it say ‘2% of 4gb of ram used’ when i have 12 gb of ram. I’m using windows 7 64 bit with 12 Gb ram and i7 8 core.”

AE CS4 is a 32-bit application, so it can only address 4 GB of RAM. (CS5 will be 64-bit, and will be able to address much, much, much more).

To get around this limitation, AE’s multiprocessing feature launches multiple instances of the After Effects rendering engine — one per core. Each instance will work on one frame at a time, and each instance can grab up to 4 GB of RAM. This is why having lots of RAM is so important in a multi-core system.

See multiprocessing for more.

[Dan Roth] “And finally, what about the scratch drive? i keep my footage of the e drive and will render out to the d drive. where does scratch fit in to all this?”

I assume you’re talking about the disk cache? It’s only used for standard previews (not for RAM previews). I don’t generally use standard preview, so I leave mine off. If you enable disk cache, it should probably be on your render drive, not the source drive.

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]

[Philip Richardson] “My question is really based on the Hardware requirements and if anyone else out there is going down this route. We have obviously seen nuke but our compositor is working in Afetr Effects and happy with it, so i don’t feel we shall shift to Nuke, mid-job.”

I’ve done a couple stereo tests with AE, and I found it really cumbersome because the software itself lacks built-in stereo support.

You might find some more information on the Stereoscopic 3D forum here.

I’ll also point out a couple threads that helped me:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/10

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/84

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/268/145

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]

Presumably, you will work with a post house or service bureau to get your animation onto HDCAM; you should check in with them about how they would want you to deliver the material. They might prefer your 1440×1080 image pillarboxed in a 1920×1080 raster.

I recommend using the “Scale Comp” script included with AE to get you started on your size change:

File > Scripts > DemoPalette.jsx > Scale Comp

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]

[Dan Roth] “I just bought a new computer with 3 drives and want to know where to set the default cache and rendering output locations to get maximum speed on renders.”

I believe the recommended configuration in a 3-drive setup is one drive for the system and apps, one for footage, and one for renders. In other words, if you kept your footage in the D drive, render to the E drive.

It depends on the sort of work you do, but very few of my renders are disk-bound — they are all either CPU- or RAM-bound. Hopefully, your new computer has plenty of cores (quad-core or dual quad-core) and 2-4 GB of RAM per core for efficient multiprocessing.

[Dan Roth] “I have a C drive (250GB) for system programs; D drive (1TB) for storage and E drive (1TB with Raid 0 for mirror backup) for my AE files and other documents.”

Just a quick note on RAIDs — please pardon me if I’m responding to to a typo.

RAID-0 is striping, not mirroring; it spreads the data across two or more disks for added speed, but there is no redundancy. If one drive fails, you lose the entire data set. RAID-1 is mirroring, which means one write is committed to multiple drives at the same time; if a drive in the set fails, you still have all your data on at least one other drive.

Also, I cringe when I see “RAID” and “backup” in the same sentence. RAID-0 has no redundancy. RAID-1 has redundancy, but if you accidentally delete a file on RAID-1, it’s immediately gone from all disks in the set. Even in a RAID-5 setup, if your controller fails, you could immediately lose your data.

RAID in most levels (not 0) provides redundancy that protects you against a single disk failure, but that’s all. It does not protect against catastrophic failure, user error, or plain bad luck (like simultaneous failure of multiple drives).

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]

[Alan fabius] “How do I render a composition so that it is restricted to composition size?”

This is exactly how it works; AE comps render at the frame size specified in their composition settings.

Are you sure you were viewing the entire frame size while you were working? Screen shots of your UI and the final movie might be helpful.

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]

Is there something else going on in to the text layer in that first image? It looks like it curves down as it heads back in z-space.

Have you applied some other effect to that layer?

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 don’t think After Effects would be my first choice for compositing in stereo; it can only render one camera at a time.

Check out Nuke from The Foundry; it supports stereoscopic 3D out of the box.

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 interpreting your post to mean that you are making the animation in AE, but when you bring the footage back to FCP, it’s pixelated.

How are you getting the footage out of AE? What render settings and what output module? Are you working in an interlaced video format in Final Cut?

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]

Nice script.

There’s also an inexpensive Digieffects plugin called Falloff that might help.

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 LaRonde] “If you look at the system requirements for the current version of Adobe Creative Suite — at least the video portion of it, called Production Premium, you will learn that you should used an Intel-based system and not an AMD system.”

Here are the specs; if you use AMD, it must support SSE2.

I’d only consider AMD right now if upfront cost were the primary factor. Intel’s current processors are simply faster and more efficient. So much faster, I think, that they’d pay for themselves over the first couple projects.

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