[Walter Soyka]

Playback will drive your composition settings.

What is the native resolution of the panel, and how are you going to connect the laptop to the panel?

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] “mind if I quote you to my uppers when I ask for more RAM? :)”

Of course not! I went into a little more detail on After Effects RAM usage in multiprocessing in this post.

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out Todd Kopriva’s blog post on RAM and After Effects performance.

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]

[Barry Goch] “Every time I render out the piece, there is no motion blur on the elements that should have it. I’ve checked to see that motion blur is turned on everywhere it is supposed to be, but I don’t know what I’m missing.”

Do you see motion blur when you preview, but not when you render? If so, you should double-check your Render Settings in the Render Queue to make sure that Motion Blur is not turned off there.

If not, then you probably still have moblur turned off somewhere; it must be on for the layers you want to blur, and it must be turned on at the top of each of the pre-comps’ timelines.

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] “would my render time speed up if I was to upgrade to 6 GB of RAM?”

Perhaps some; 6 GB is still not a lot of RAM as far as After Effects is concerned. With 4 cores, you really want between 8 and 16 GB of RAM to enable multi-processing.

With 6 GB, you could probably run two instances of AE at the same time; check out the Throttle script to limit the number of cores AE uses when 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]

I don’t use Premiere Pro myself, but I can give you the After Effects perspective.

[James Malamatinas] “I have:

– Core i7 920 CPU
– 6 GB DDR3 RAM (Triple Channel)
– 2 x 1 TB HDD 7200 RPM”

6 GB is not enough RAM to take full advantage of After Effect’s multiprocessing. You you want between 2 and 4 GB of RAM per core; with your quad-core and triple channel RAM, you should aim for 12 GB.

Three hard drives would suit you well; one for your OS and apps, one for your footage, and one for your renders.

[James Malamatinas] “I will be doing a new install with windows 7 64-bit. “

Outstanding. You need the 64-bit edition to get access to all that 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]

Andrew Kramer to the rescue:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_shadows/

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_light_casting/

With the techniques he teaches in these two tutorials, you should be able to accomplish your “text in the scene” effect.

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]

Can you talk about about your system? What OS are you running? What processors do you have?

First thing: with only 2 GB of RAM, multi-processing should definitely be turned off.

Assuming this is related to your previous post on the 3D buildings, I bet it its the depth of field in your camera that is killing you on render time. Can you disable DOF and fake it with some fast blurs instead?

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 could suggest two approaches:

To use only built-in features, I’d try duplicating the keyed footage, adjusting the anchor point on the duplicate, and adding some extreme horizontal scaling (but no vertical scaling). Use Fractal Noise with some short, wide blocky settings and some judicious masking to generate a matte to use with the scaled footage. Apply the inverse of that matte to the original footage.

Alternately, you might check out Idustrial Revolution’s ParticleMetrix or Trapcode Form if you want to use your video as the basis for a particle system.

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 hope I was able to help. If you need some more input on AE-FCP workflow, there are lotsof knowledgeable people in the After Effects forum and the Final Cut forum here on the COW.

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]

Check out my recent post on how to render to image sequences — when your render fails, you can re-start it where it left off.

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