[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Mullen] “Conceivably, it would be a great way to background render AE comps without investing in a plugin like Nucleo.”

If that’s what you’re looking to do, check out Lloyd Alvarez’s BG Renderer script.

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]

Vince, I’m sorry to see that you haven’t gotten an answer to this question yet.

I don’t know of a Blu-ray player with no OSD after pause, either; every event I’ve been on with Blu-ray playback has suffered around the lengthy delay while the OSD clears. If you find the unit you’re looking for, I’d love to hear about it.

Is DDR really not an option?

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] “Adobe’s literature has always implied — for the past thirteen or fourteen years that I know about — that mp3s work just as well in AE as Quicktime movies in the animation codec”

Funny you should pick that example, since AE renders large-raster Quicktime movies in Animation codec that it can’t import back in…

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/969907

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/972459

I think I’m the image-sequence guy on this forum; maybe I’ll have to start lobbying for “sample sequences,” 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]

[Matt Sturns] “We are presenting at an event and will be using the Panasonic TH-85PF12UK 85″ Plasma TV 1080P. We are looking to go from a PC (tower) to the monitor. We are looking to get the highest quality possible. What are our options. We will have a pretty fast PC. Also what is the best file / type to ouput to this monitor from a PC?”

Can you be a little more specific about what kind of content you are presenting? PowerPoint? Video? Flash?

Is there an event production company helping you stage the event, or is this self-produced?

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]

[Sam Bell] “Well, just for the fun of it, I entered the “suggested” frame size of 320×240 pixels in the Stretch option, and rendered out a quick 5 seconds…and I still get black borders on the left/right sides.”

Does your comp perhaps use rectangular pixels instead of square ones?

[Sam Bell] “Going through a lossless format doubles the render time and I don’t want to deal with large files in the GBs. Just need a good WMV exporter that does what you tell it to do. :)”

The workflow you’re looking for is certainly a little more convenient, but you’re sacrificing a lot of quality. AE cannot do multipass compression, which would help reduce compression artifacts like blocking and banding, and keep file sizes low. It’s really important for high-quality WMV and h264 media, which is why most folks here recommend using a third-party encoder.

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]

Perhaps AE is using multiprocessing, and AME is not?

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]

[Ben Mettler] ” I don’t have a camera and trying to set one up so that it has the same perspective as the top view seems like a pain. Any ideas? “

If you can display your composition at 100% size on your monitor, you can save screen grabs, frame by frame, through your animation. Be sure to turn off the view of masks and layer controls. Re-import these as an image sequence, crop to size, and render out.

This can be automated some if you’ve got some keyboard macro software and a lot of time, but otherwise setting up the camera might be less painful.

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]

It sounds like there is a frame size mismatch somewhere in your compression settings.

After Effects is not a great compression application. It’s incapable of multi-pass compression, which generates much cleaner WMV files.

A better workflow is to render lossless animations from AE and bring them into a third-party compression application, like Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze. If you are on a PC, you can use Microsoft’s free WMV encoder.

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]

Here’s a script for baking AE camera data.

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]

[Franzi Stodt] “I tried it via File/Interpret File/Main….and a number in the loop window.
I dont know why, but it doesnt work. The program shows the loops transparent in the layer, but it simply plays 1 time… And the second thing I tried is via Layer/Time/Enable Time Remapping and than write down an expression in Time Remap (loopOut())…. But its also not working, but I dont know why, normally should work both ways?

Does anybody know what I did wrong? Did I forgot a check anywhere?” “

You need to extend the clip in your timeline in both cases. The transparent area is telling you there is more media beyond the current out point.

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