[Walter Soyka]

When your artist asks for a broadcast monitor, I think he or she is not asking for another computer monitor, but rather a real video monitor from Flanders Scientific, Panasonic, Sony, or the like. This will require a video card from a vendor like AJA or Blackmagic, and will allow more accurate judgment on color, exposure, and interlacing.

Here’s some more information on previewing with an external video monitor.

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 not sure where the threshold is, but when working with large frame sizes, sometimes AE writes animation codec movies it can’t read.

Try rendering to an image sequence instead – PSD, PNG, TIFF, and TGA all support transparency.

Other big benefits of image sequences include the ability to re-render only a portion of an animation if you make changes; the ability to easily resume failed renders, and cross-platform portability.

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]

[Charles Ferran] “Maximum RAM Cache size 100% = 3GB’s “

I think your maximum RAM cache is set way too high. The default is 60%, and Adobe doesn’t recommend going over 90%.

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]

[Charles Ferran] “the thing that has me scared is, the project I started asking questions about, the 3D one, I tried to render it again with multiprocessing turned on, and it just froze up, a frame every 15 minutes again…”

This 3D project of yours is a monster, isn’t it?

Have you tweaked the settings under Preferences > Memory & 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]

[Heather Crank] ” called said store’s corporate headquarters to try to get a screen size. I was told it varies, most screens are not hd… So I think 4:3 would be a safe bet. But how to make this animation flexible, incase the size of the screens vary? “

I wouldn’t assume that 4:3 is a safe bet until the client specifically tells you that. If some of the stores do have HD or 16:9 panels, your content will either be pillarboxed or stretched.

I’ve had to repurpose existing 16:9 content for 4:3 screens before, and I did it by hand. I started with 16:9, then added in pillarboxes to show the 4:3 area. It was a lot of precomping, rescaling, repositioning, and re-keyframing. It’s tedious work, but since the aspect ratio has a huge impact on layout, there’s no automatic way, so it was worth the effort.

Planning ahead, you can start in 16:9 with a 4:3 guide layer while you work, and either center-cut or pan-and-scan your 16:9 work to 4:3 later.

Alternately,you can work within a 16:9 safety frame over a larger 4:3 background — for example, working in a 1920×1080 portion of a 1920×1440 comp. Look to the 16:9 area for your action/title safe, but think of the 4:3 like printers think of bleed.

These workflows assume one ratio will be important, and one is secondary.

If they are both important, you should do two separate versions, so plan the relationship between design elements carefully. I would only create the second version after the first one has final approval to avoid repeating work unnecessarily.

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]

[Jasper Wiese] “They keep mentioning beta cams etc. “

It sounds like they are requiring delivery on tape. If you don’t have access to a Beta deck and aren’t comfortable with the terms in the requirements, you might need to take this to an editorial house or service bureau. They could lay it off to tape and help you meet the delivery requirements.

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]

You can use a particle system like Trapcode Particular or CC Particle World that is aware of the comp camera to generate your starfield.

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]

No one instance of AE will see the whole 11 GB of RAM. AE is currently a 32-bit application, so it can can only “see” up to 4 GB. On the Mac, this is further limited to 3 or 3.5 GB for the main instance (I believe it reserves memory for toolkits and the GUI).

Multiprocessing works around this by limitation by launching multiple instances of the AE renderer at the same time, each of which can grab its own 4 GB, so all the RAM in your system can be used. Each instance works on its own frame and requires its own RAM to work efficiently; this is why we encouraged you to get more RAM, and this is what allows you to render multiple frames simultaneously.

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]

Why not try it out? Adobe offers 30-day trials for each program in the suite.

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]

[Mak Tzoep] “say I film a street with static objects. Then a person passes through the frame. I tell the prog/plug to select the difference, thus being able to turn the result into a mask”

If your goal is to remove the person from the shot, you might look into Boris FX Motion Key.

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