[Walter Soyka]

You don’t want to use AE to output h264. AE is incapable of multi-pass rendering, which is essential for good-looking h264 compression.

Instead, you should use the “Best Quality” render setting and “Lossless” output module (don’t forget to add in audio if necessary), and use a real compression application like Episode, Squeeze, Compressor, ProCoder, etc. to make your final h264 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]

[Ricardo Spencer] “I already tried to separate layers of solid, using Numbers. Ex: From 000 to 999, then another layer 400 to 508. Unfortunately, they don´t sync.”

Of course they don’t sync; the 000 to 999 layer must run one thousand times faster than the 400 to 508 layer.

You might check out this thread, just a couple below yours. You’ll have to tweak the values in the expression, but it looks like what you want.

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]

[Lloyd Vennie] “Basically a live person that has a ghost of another person inside him doing the same action. I’ve tried opacity in After effects and the color washed out. Ive tried placing a 3ds model inside my person but still not quite right.”

So you’ve got the assets already, but you’re having trouble compositing them together convincingly? Can you post some images of what you’re working with and what you’ve tried already but didn’t like?

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 might try the Adobe Flash 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]

You’re welcome, Jim — I hope I was able to add some value.

We’d love to hear back once your event is done about how you solved your workflow challenges and what kind of results you saw.

Thanks!

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]

[Dave LaRonde] “Any computer equipped with QT Pro 7.x has both The animation and the PNG codecs, both of which support alpha channels, and both of which can be read on Macs.

It’s a Right Royal Pain for us users that Apple and Microsoft won’t just decide to play nice with each other.”

Hear, hear!

I also frequently use image sequences. TIFF, Targa, and PNG sequences all support transparency, they are about as cross-platform as you get, and they don’t require Quicktime to use.

As a side benefit, you can restart failed image sequences renders where they leave 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

[Walter Soyka]

I’m also a Zaxwerks user, but for the sake of completeness, there are at least two other options worth mentioning.

You could look into Boris 3D Objects; there’s a demo, so you can make sure it runs on AE7.

You could also upgrade to CS4, which includes native support for Photoshop 3D objects, although they are limited in comparison with Zaxwerks.

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]

[Simon Ball] “The command I’m using to invoke the render is…

‘/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4/aerender’ -project /Volumes/folders/folder/project.aep”

Simon, I have no idea why that would render differently inside of and outside of AE. It should be the same. Is OpenGL turned off?

When rendering from the command line, I always specify all my settings; what comp to render, what render settings to use, what output module to use, etc., but if everything is set up properly in the queue, I don’t see why it should make a difference. Sorry I can’t be more helpful 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]

[Phil Brough] “I was wondering if there is a way to install a prores codec on a PC so I can output movies from After Effects using the prores codec.”

There is only a ProRes decoder available for Windows — no encoder. You must encode ProRes on Macs.

Avid’s DNxHD is a comparable cross-platform alternative to ProRes 422. I don’t believe there’s anything similar to ProRes 4444.

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]

[Simon Ball] “When rendering through the terminal, keyed footage that appears clean in AE has holes in its alpha channel. I’m using the keylight plugin and when viewing full quality in AE, as well as when rendering out of AE to QT, the alpha channel is clean, with no spots.”

That’s really odd; I was under the impression that AE actually uses aerender when rendering multiple frames, and I’ve never noticed anything like that when rendering from Terminal.

You’re on Snow Leopard; have you installed the AE 9.0.2 update?

Can you post the command you’re using to invoke the renderer?

[Simon Ball] “In addition to this, I’ve found that colours change slightly when rendering through the terminal compared to the AE composition window. “

Are you by chance comparing the results in a Quicktime player with the results in AE? Gamma issues still abound; do the results look the same if you reimport the footage into AE?

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