[Walter Soyka]

[Jonathan Lutjens] “When you guys say that AE is incapable of multi-pass compression, does that mean that the final movies won’t play correctly and will have file errors, or simply that AE doesn’t do correct compression for H.264 and one should use another piece of software in order to get the best looking color, motion, etc?”

AE should create a perfectly compliant h.264 file, but multi-pass compression really improves the visual quality of the final product. It allows the compressor to analyze the video before it makes any compression decisions, so the output tends to show less blocking or banding.

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]

[Jonathan Lutjens] “Now I’m trying to stitch those 3 sequences into 1 H.264 quicktime movie (which is what I have to deliver to the production company) and things are not going well. After Effects seems to be getting hung up on certain files in the sequence, but the files open fine in PS and show no apparent corruption.”

I design motion media for widescreen events, too, and I’m curious why the production company is asking for a 3600×1080 h.264.

First, the production company is almost certainly going to have to either anamorphically squish your output, or re-split your output again (probably into 2 channels of 1920×1080 video) for playback. If you can get some more details on the playback system and its requirements, you can probably avoid an unnecessary generational loss and extra work on-site.

Secondly, you shouldn’t use After Effects for compressing h.264. It’s not capable of multi-pass compression, which is necessary for good encodes. Instead, you can make a lossless movie from AE and use another compression program like Compressor, Episode, or Squeeze.

Thirdly, you may or may not get unexpected results encoding and playing h.264 in a non-standard frame size that large.

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 a Twixtor user, too, but you might be able to get good results without getting a plugin. I have satisfactorily re-created missing frames with Time Remapping with pixel motion frame blending. The results will depend on your footage and the nature of the problem.

If you have two frames and need to generate an intermediate, enable Time Remapping for the layer, keyframe the first frame and the second frame, then pull the second frame’s keyframe forward in time by one frame.

Just be careful if you use it on the entire clip; you must slide ALL the keyframes down one frame from where you insert the new intermediate, otherwise you will remap time across the entire clip.

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]

[Jako Krull] “I do use the render multiple frames, but Im still a little confused with the interface… There is a slider that lets me pick between longer ram preview and faster rendering… so what is the difference? ohh also could you tell me what would be the best settings for me there, If I would wanna have a RAM preview as fast as I can get and as long as I can get? Right now Ive set it so that each core uses 1 GB and that there are two cores working on after effects. “

You should probably turn Multiprocessing off. You don’t have enough RAM right now to really make use of it. See Todd Kopriva’s great blog post on RAM requirements for multiprocessing for more information, and my COW post on how RAM starvation slows down your system.

If your performance is limited by your hardware, you might need to adjust your workflow to get better preview. I do have 32 GB of RAM, but a lot of my work is ultra-widescreen at above 4K frame sizes, so even though I have more RAM than you or Dave, I have to make some compromises in my workflow just the same.

I am constantly adjusting my work area, and I use Shift-RAM preview for a super low resolution preview that skips every other frame. I use proxies all the time; I pre-comp related elements, get them locked down, then render it out so I can see my previous work when I move to the next set of layers.

You might also look into the region of interest feature.

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 Aharon Rabinowitz’s tutorial on text-to-sand?

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]

[Steve Dorsey] “My countdown is a 30-frame loop but on a 29.97 frame timeline. At about the 523rd second, the countdown and the real frames are out of sync by one frame.”

You’re probably seeing the difference between drop frame and non-drop frame time code.

This link explains it pretty well.

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]

4 GB is not very much RAM for After Effects.

AE itself is 32-bit, which means it can access up to 4 GB of RAM; however, through multi-processing, it can launch multiple instances (one per core) and each of those processes can access up to 4 GB of RAM.

You can really speed up your previews and renders by adding RAM and enabling multiprocessing. You want to aim for 2 to 4 GB of RAM per core; in your case, you’d want 8 to 16 GB of total system RAM. This requires a 64-bit operating system, which you already have.

RAM previews are limited in length by free RAM available (up to 4 GB) to the main instance of After Effects.

Of your 4 GB of total system RAM, your operating system is probably eating up a gigabyte or two, and that only leaves AE 2-3 GB of RAM, when it could potentially access 4 GB. Depending on your comp and actual RAM usage, you might be able to increase the length of your previews by maybe 50% or so.

When AE goes 64-bit in CS5, the preview length limitation will evaporate, because the main process will be able to access much, much more RAM than 4 GB.

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]

[Stephen Cordes] “I quote from the subpage of the link above. The offici adobe help Manual

“CPUs To Leave For Other Applications Set this value to a number other than 0 to prevent After Effects from using all of the CPUs (processor cores) in your computer system. For example, if you have a computer with 8 CPUs, setting this value to 2 leaves 6 CPUs for After Effects.”

I read that as more of an explanation than a command. If you had eight cores, you could leave a couple idle during render so you could work on something else and your computer would still have enough horsepower to be responsive. With two cores, if you want to increase your render speed, you can leave it set to 0, but you shouldn’t expect your computer to be very responsive to you while it’s maxed out rendering.

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]

Respectfully, we are trying to help you and answer your questions, but your tone is coming across as very argumentative.

[Taliesn Jones] “You know you really had me one your side until you added this precious little info-nugget. I was under *no* illusion that if I was purchasing a Quad Core iMac that I was getting anything more than 4 cores that apparently Adobe CS 4 can’t deal with efficiently via Hyper-threading.”

I think part of the disconnect here is that you are using the term “hyper-threading” inaccurately. Hyper-threading refers to running two threads simultaneously on a single core, essentially creating two virtual cores on one physical core. This is why Todd and I answered with distinctions between physical cores and virtual cores.

[Taliesn Jones] “Knowing this your misexplainantion of what I’m missing here is quite the overreach on your part. FYI a *Quad Core* Nehalem/i7 are *4 cores* acting in concert that share a *single* physical chip. So with that fact your explanation is totally non-sequitur.”

After Effects uses multiprocessing in order to render multiple frames simultaneously and reduce render times. If you read the linked livedoc, you’ll see that it does this by launching one render process per core.

AE’s renderer is frame-based; it is not a scanline or bucket renderer. After Effects does NOT hand a frame over the CPU and ask the CPU to split it among its four cores; it hands each core one frame at a time to render.

It’s still using all the processing power available, but the internal architecture of the i7 chip really has nothing to do with it. Neither AE nor Motion are currently tuned specifically for Nehalem to my knowledge.

[Taliesn Jones] “Thus when I read that the 3.0.6 Core2 Duo with an 8 GB rack-o’-RAM in the just released iMac would literally dance around my Dual 2.5 Gb G5 I was there and let me tell you the portability factor was a dream and around $1k cheaper than the laptop solution with 24″ screen in the bargain.”

Agreed that the iMac is a huge leap up over a G5. I’ve still got an old G5 in the office, and my iMac runs circles around it. That said, my Mac Pro runs circles around my iMac.

When you get your Mac Pro for your studio, go for an upgraded ATI video card, and you’ll see a big boost in Motion performance, too.

[Taliesn Jones] “It is within this context that i sought out real world results of whether the up-grade to the Quad-core iMac made it worth the expense.”

If your renders are slowing down, then yes, the two additional cores in a quad iMac will give you a noticeable speed boost over your existing Core 2 Duo.

As for on-site playback of live content, I find it’s far less about the processor power, and far more about the speed and latency of the disk subsystem.

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 also always used Flash for this; I don’t know any other way to get a vector sequence.

Do you get the errors on renders, or just while you’re working? If you can render cleanly from the SWF, you might create a rasterized proxy from the SWF so you can work, and then use a render settings template that ignores proxies for final output.

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