[Walter Soyka]

Todd is an invaluable contributor to this forum, and he always gives great advice. His recommendations cover the first troubleshooting steps for AE on 10.6.

He may have misread your original post, but he did actually give you a direct answer to your question, which you might have missed. I quote from the thread above:

[Taliesn Jones] “Thus i’m consulting the iNet for plain English , matter-of-fact, and to-the-point confirmation that Adobe CS4 Production Suite does , in fact , make use of the hyper-threading on the OSX side now that OSX 10.6+ drives the Nehalem”

[Todd Kopriva] “The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing features uses physical cores, not virtual cores.”

So the answer is no, AE will not use hyper-threading. If you get a quad-core machine, it will use four physical cores with multiprocessing, not eight virtual ones.

[Taliesn Jones] “I can;t beleive that out of all of the working AE CS$ OSX professionals on this list not a one stepped up to the plate to offer a basic *real world* response. Oh well. Times change I s’pose.”

In my opinion, an iMac isn’t well-suited for professional motion media work. It’s not expandable, so you can’t add a video card (like AJA or Blackmagic Design, not graphics cards like ATI or NVIDIA) to monitor your work on a broadcast monitor. You can’t add a RAID card for working with uncompressed HD footage. You’ll have to daisy-chain multiple external hard drives and maybe a Blu-ray burner off a single FW800 bus. An eight-core Mac Pro is a much more substantial machine, and far better suited for motion media 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]

[William Laven] “…it only imports frames 1-999. The sequence is 1,440 frames, but it just refuses to Import the entire sequence, always stopping at 999.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve used AE 5.5, so this is a wild guess, but do your filenames have enough leading zeroes? In other words, is it Image999.jpg or Image0999.jpg?

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]

Agreed on Camera Mapper — it will give you that parallax effect on your ground plane as the camera moves into z-space that you cannot achieve with standard multi-plane animation.

You can tweak the look of your motion blur quite a bit in the Advanced tab of your composition settings. To completely reverse it, though, I’d animate the sequence backwards, render it with motion blur, re-import the render, and reverse 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]

AE is not the tool for this.

Try MPEG Streamclip; it’s a great tool, and it’s free. You can use it to transcode VOB to whatever format (DV, ProRes, etc.) that you’re editing with in FCP.

It relies on the Apple Quicktime MPEG-2 playback component; I believe this is now part of the standard Final Cut Studio install, but it’s also available separately here.

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]

Not all codecs allow arbitrary frame sizes; many use blocks of a certain size (for example, 8×8) and require that your video frame be an even multiple of the block size.

You could export a lossless AVI from AE and try one of Microsoft’s free encoders; alternately, you might letterbox or pillarbox your output for client review purposes into a standard frame size.

The COW also has a Compression techniques forum, where you might be able to find some 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]

CFX Sphere Utilities is not the same as CC Sphere. The package is a companion to CC Sphere, and allows you to animate effects on spherical maps.

There’s a demo available, so you can try it out and make sure it suits your needs.

Cycore also has the manual and a sample project online — perhaps these will help you.

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]

OpenGL does seem to cause many problems, and disabling it is usually one of the first troubleshooting steps to try.

Check out Todd Kopriva’s recent post on this for more: basically, you can leave it on for interactions, but you should disable it for preview and render.

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]

[José Cordovil] “Basically we have three video projectors connected to a Edirol V-8 mixer that is used to mix input from 3 dvd players and 3 cameras. Most of the time, I want the same image to be on the 3 projectors. When I want different images on each projector, I use The Preview output as a sort of independent out, and when I need to do three images on three different projectors I have to change cables around. I did use a video matrix in the beginning but it turned out that it was worsening the issue of video-delay from the cameras (in part due to HD-SD conversion etc.) that was already a problem.”

This could be tricky if your budget dictates a V8. Ordinarily, I’d suggest a bigger switcher that supports multiple destinations. You could use multiple ScreenPRO II’s with a controller, an Encore, or a Spyder.

[José Cordovil] “I did use a video matrix in the beginning but it turned out that it was worsening the issue of video-delay from the cameras (in part due to HD-SD conversion etc.) that was already a problem.”

Is the video delay a problem because you’re losing sync with the sound reinforcement, or because it lags the live action so much? An audio delay will solve your first problem, but you’re probably going to have to accept a frame or two of delay.

[José Cordovil] “My question is this: if I wanted to substitute the dvd players for a computer (with independent multiple video outs) what software should I use? Something that worked like a lighting mixer “cue” style system would be great.”

To replace 3 channels of DVD playback, you’re probably going to need multiple computers. With Macs, you’re looking at Renewed Vision’s Pro Video Player or DT Video Lab’s Playback Pro with Simple Sync. You might be able to run both configurations off a single, high-spec Mac with a TripleHead2Go, but I’d recommend extensive testing.

With PCs, you’ll need something like Dataton’s Watchout or AVStumpfl’s Wings. These use timeline metaphors, but in a locked-down theatre show, that shouldn’t present a problem. You can bring live video into Watchout, so you could actually use your V8 to submix cameras, and then use Watchout to cue from videos back to IMAG in your timeline.

That would give you three fully independent output channels, but you’d have to pre-program everything.

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]

The more cores you get, the more RAM you’ll need to properly take advantage of them with AE in CS4. You should aim for 2-4 GB per core for best performance with multi-processing.

You will need a 64-bit operating system to take advantage of that much RAM.

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]

[Jason Kinouchi] “I believe it is 1366 x 768, though the exact model hasn’t been specified yet. I’m currently using a 32 inch TV to test it on. Is this going to make a difference?”

If your test monitor’s native resolution is the same as the final display monitor’s, you’re halfway there.

I’m not a fan of that funky resolution, because not all computer graphics cards play nicely with them; some cards/drivers only want to output “regular” monitor resolutions like 1280×720 or 1280×800. I think it’s pretty important to test with the final display computer.

A couple other thoughts for you and your client:

What codec and playback software do you intend to use? Will the playback laptop have the horsepower it needs to drive the display without dropping frames?

In live events, it’s standard operating procedure to always run all media playback with a switcher and a live backup. This way, if a computer, DDR, or tape deck fails during playback, you can press a button and no one’s day is ruined.

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