[Walter Soyka]

[Adam McEwen] “Rendering to a decent external HD with tonnes of free space. “

You’re getting a write error, so I’m guessing it’s not actually a RAM problem. I’ll hazard a wild guess: is your drive formatted FAT32, and your render failing when the movie hits the 4GB mark?

If that’s the case, you could either render to an image sequence, or convert the drive to NTFS.

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]

[Mario Sahe-Lacheante] “The videos are normally edited either in XDCAM or ProRes 422 in FCP, with text added in AE and then rendered out as animation, after which the final video and audio will be rendered out of FCP in one of the above codecs”

What comp settings are your AE artists using?

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 think we’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.

I’d shoot at 23.976/24p and edit at 23.976/24p, as this is about as close to the universal frame rate as we’ll get. Avoid 29.97 with pull-down at this stage.

On-site in Europe, export your finished 23.976/24p timeline as a self-contained movie. Use Cinema Tools to conform the clip to 25 fps. This takes seconds to do. The clip is now about 4% faster. If the pitch change absolutely kills you, reimport the conformed clip into FCP, add the AUPitch audio filter, and set the pitch value to about -90.

Not only will your projection be flawless on 50 Hz systems, but you can now deliver to a European HD video standard.

Back in the States, keep it at 24p if you’re going to NTSC DVD or Blu-ray; only add pull-down to 29.97 if you need to for tape or broadcast.

Keeping your footage “universal” like this will give you the most flexible for delivery or re-use later.

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]

It’s not the difference between NTSC and PAL frame rates that matters; it’s the difference between your media frame rate and output display refresh rate that matter.

European video gear will likely run at 50 Hz (possibly 75 Hz), and your computer’s refresh rate should be set to match the output refresh rate. That means your output will be sampling your video 50 times per second, while your video runs at 23.976, 24, 29.97, or 59.94 fps, depending on your standard.

Your computer’s video card will not add pull-down automatically; you would need your software to have this feature.

Are you connecting directly to the projector, or are you going through a switcher? Is the switcher PAL, HD, or multi-format hi-res?

I just did a project where we showed 23.976 media on a 59.94 Hz system; it was tolerable, but a little jerky.

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]

Automatic Duck could still be an option, but to avoid HDV as Dave says, you’d need to use FCP’s Media Manager to transcode the project to ProRes, and then Duck the new, media-managed project.

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]

Acquiring HDV and transcoding to full-raster, square pixel ProRes on capture is a pretty standard workflow, so I wouldn’t expect any problems there.

HDV has a 1080-line flavor. It uses 1440 horizontal pixels with a 1.33 PAR, as you were alluding to, but so do DVCPRO HD and HDCAM. The display device has to go to 1920 square pixels anyway, so you may as well do the conversion on ingest for the convenience of using square pixels throughout your workflow.

Of course, scaling HDV 720 to HDV 1080 would be problematic.

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 can order the Playback Pro Enabler Key from the same DT Video Labs site you found the demo on.

Color management is somewhat tricky; projection will represent your colors somewhat differently than your computer monitor does.

Mac OS X has a basic by-eye calibrator built into the Display preference panel. If sRGB doesn’t look right on-site, you might try running the calibrator.

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]

It’s worth noting that ProRes is not included in the default Quicktime installation; the full codec is installed only with Final Cut Studio.

The ProRes decoder is also available as a separate, free download from Apple. If you don’t have FCP on the Mac Pro, you’ll need this for playback.

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]

[Jordan Montreuil] “Wow, Walter. You just blew my mind. Thanks a bunch. That will be really helpful in the future.”

Thanks for the kind words, and I hope you do find it helpful! I work with extremely large comp sizes for my hi-res widescreen events clients, so even with 32 GB of RAM, I’ve had to learn a lot about both tuning my workflow and AE’s performance settings the hard way.

I just can’t wait until AE CS5 brings us 64-bit goodness and eliminates these problems caused by 32-bit RAM limitations…

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]

[Jordan Montreuil] “Going to try and proxy my clips and see what happens.”

Two things: First, proxies will not include audio by default, so if you need it, you should manually add it to the Output Module when you render the proxy. Second, don’t forget to change the “Proxy Use” settings to “Use All Proxies” in your Render Settings on the final comp.

I’ve missed both of those so many times myself that I created templates specifically for use with proxies.

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