[Walter Soyka]

[Mario Sahe-Lacheante] “XDCAM from EX3 cameras”

XDCAM EX SP (1440×1080), or XDCAM EX HQ (1920×1080)? Hopefully this is on the same setting for all cameras…

[Mario Sahe-Lacheante] “It varies, there’s no particular template everyone works off – because different people contribute to the media from different areas, including some freelancers”

I’d think that this is your first problem in trying to track down the issue. A standardized workflow will make QC issues like this much, much easier to find and to fix.

[Mario Sahe-Lacheante] “I have seen though, sometimes people will work in anamorphic in FCP, 16×9 an AE, and render out the final video again from FCP in anamorphic, before our Episode process makes it 16×9 again”

Yikes. There’s nothing wrong with working anamorphically all the way through, but bouncing back and forth will not be kind to your footage.

[Mario Sahe-Lacheante] “Most of them would render natively out of FCP and import into AE, mostly Apple ProRess 422 HQ and XDCAM from EX3 cameras, and work from then onwards to add effects and text.”

As a general rule of thumb, After Effects performs better with intraframe-compressed footage like ProRes than it does with interframe-compressed footage like XDCAM (which uses long-GOP MPEG2 for video). Also, ProRes uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, but XDCAM is only 4:2:0, so ProRes is much better suited for graphics.

I’d try to standardize your FCP editors on square-pixel ProRes (you probably don’t need ProRes HQ); that should smooth out your workflow down through the rest of the tool chain.

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 Turner] “My thought was that if I can use something like the Cineform Codec to export out of Sony Vegas and then keep the same codec in AE, would this reduce the render time.?”

I’d doubt it. As Todd mentioned, AE doesn’t pay any attention to what codec you’re using. It decodes the frame, works with it internally as uncompressed, and then encodes it again on render.

Unless your render is disk-bound (which is unlikely; standards conversion tends to be processor-bound), you won’t see any time savings from using Cineform, and you may even see a slight performance and quality hit from the extra decode-encode cycles.

[Andrew Turner] “At the moment all I am trying to achieve is a HD Master clip and a SD PAL Master clip”

A big red flag here: if your HD material and your SD material are each running at different frame rates, you will not have consistent time code across your clips, so won’t be able to easily conform one edit to another. In other words, if these are source clips for another project, you will have to edit two versions (HD and SD PAL) by hand.

Hopefully I’ve misunderstood, and you’re doing standards conversion as the last step in your workflow on your edited 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

[Walter Soyka]

[Anupam Saikia] “Is there any possibilities to get 2K resolution digital cinema projections using two HD or XVGA projectors ?”

2K resolution is 2048×1080. You can’t get that with two XGA projectors, because there isn’t enough vertical resolution. I suppose you could theoretically do that with two HD projectors at 1920×1080, but the overlap would be over 90%, and I doubt it would meet digital cinema standards anyway.

Why not just use a single 1920×1080 HD projector, or rent a real 2K projector if absolutely necessary?

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]

[Adam McEwen] “So is this safe to do? Would it be wise to back everything on the drive up or would that not be needed?”

Well…. it’s always wise to back up everything on the drive, but I’ve never seen a problem with convert myself.

Here’s the Microsoft support article for more information.

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 want to use a text layer as a track matte for your video layer.

Put your video layer in the timeline. Create a text layer immediately on top of it. Now, select your video layer, and then click Layer > Track Matte > Alpha Matte. (Alternately, you can set the track matte on the Modes panel in the timeline; press F4 to toggle between switches and modes if you don’t see it.)

EDIT: It seems that Todd types faster than I do — sorry for the duplicate information!

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]

[Adam McEwen] ” I rendered to a different drive… Now to reformatting my drive.”

Adam, I’m glad to hear my suggestion worked.

There’s no need to reformat your disk. Windows can convert a FAT16 or FAT32 disk to NTFS non-destructively. Just a note — once you convert to NTFS, you cannot convert it back to FAT; if you wanted to make the disk FAT again, you’d have to reformat.

Just open a command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt) and enter the following:

convert Z: /fs:ntfs

Of course, change the drive letter as necessary on your specific 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]

[Anthony Giola] “after effects now gives me a Bad Memory Tracking ID message … Am currently working on a Hi-Def project which takes quite a while to load once After Effects gets Closed”

Are you using HDV footage by any chance? If so, see Dave’s Stock Answer #1. AE doesn’t like interframe compression on source footage; you should transcode any interframe footage to an intraframe codec, like Uncompressed or Motion-JPEG (not MPEG) before bringing it into AE.

Also, 4GB is not a lot of memory for AE, and if you have multiprocessing enabled, you should turn it off. You want to aim for 2 to 4 GB per core, with some overhead for the operating system and any other applications, so a 4-core machine would need 8 to 16 GB of RAM. 8 cores would need 16 to 32 GB of 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]

We’d need a lot more information on your system before we could offer any concrete suggestions as to what the cause of the problem might be.

How much RAM do you have? AE needs lots of RAM, so if you’ve got less than 4 GB, or if you’re running 32-bit Windows, you should turn multiprocessing off in AE and Nucleo Pro.

In general, you should avoid source footage with interframe compression (this includes, but is not limited to, HDV footage and WMV, MP4, MPG, and M2V files). You should transcode them to something that uses intraframe compression (this includes, but is not limited to, uncompressed AVI and Quicktime with Motion-JPG or PNG compression) before bringing them into AE.

You should also avoid using AE to do your final compression; it’s incapable of multi-pass encoding, so it doesn’t make great WMV or h264 files. You should use the render queue to create a lossless file from AE, and then compress that file in a program like Squeeze, Episode, Compressor, ProCoder, or even the free Windows Media Encoder for WMV on PC.

See this post from Dave LaRonde for more on these two topics.

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 agree completely with Greg on the challenges of using prosumer HDV camcorders for live events, and the lack of CCU would be a dealbreaker for me.

Are your clients asking you for HD? In my experience, most events seem to be sticking with SD — using HD for IMAG makes great makeup and lighting very, very important. On the other hand, where HD is necessary, HDV’s chroma subsampling may make it undesirable.

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]

[John McIntosh] “I am working on a HUGE composite in both res and file size… 4K PSD with 100+ Layers! Yikes :P”

I regularly work on ultra-widescreen comps well beyond 4k resolution, and as you’ve discovered, proxies are a critical part of the workflow.

[John McIntosh] “Problem 1: The problem is that now anytime I make a change to a layer (layer visibility/effects/etc) there no live update!? Instead I get the red proxy bar across the bottom the (same as caps lock disabling refresh) Now I have to turn off proxy to see the change? How is this helpful??”

This is exactly how proxies SHOULD work. The whole point is use a piece of media instead of the layers in the timeline to speed up your workflow.

[John McIntosh] “Solution 2 / Problem 2: Manually select every layer (100+) and create a proxy for each (which seems to solve problem #1).”

I’ve never proxied every individual source layer of a comp — I can only imagine how maddening that would get.

I would suspect you’d be able to get a whole bunch of related layers together, pre-compose them, animate them within their precomps, and then use proxies on a much more manageable number of pre-comps.

When we work with really large comps like you’re doing now, we create storyboards and animatics ahead of time. Because of the render constraints of keeping everything live, we have to plan ahead instead of just diving in and playing around, so we separate the creative decisions from the actual implementation.

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