[Walter Soyka]

[chris mclaughlin] ” should I spend the money on the processor and have the standard 5400 rpm drive?”

Hard drive speed may affect your system more than you expect. Although it won’t likely impact renders in your situation, it will affect everything else, especially if you’re not getting a ton of RAM: how fast your computer boots, how fast applications open, and how fast virtual memory access is.

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]

Since you have 4 GB of RAM, I’d still leave multiprocessing off on a MacBook Pro. I’m on a MBP right now, and with only Mac OS X and Safari running, I’ve already used 1.3 GB of RAM. If you can get your MBP up to 6 or 8 GB of RAM, you might consider turning it back on.

I’m not sure about disk caching with an SSD — if you try it and see a big improvement, we’d love to hear about 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]

Is there anything unique about frame 170 that might be causing it to fail? Are there any effects on any of the footage at that frame?

Can you render just that one frame? Or save it as Photoshop layers?

I’ve had to go as low as 5 frames on the secret Purge setting to output a project. You might even try purging every frame. Just don’t forget to change your secret settings back when you are done, because frequent purges slow down render dramatically.

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 not a projectionist, so others here might have more to add, but I’d look into doing this with a single 16:9 projector stack, overscanning your screen. I’d think that the amount of keystoning that you’re suggesting will make blending a challenge.

A system like Vista Spyder or Barco Encore will handle the blending and allow you to arrange your video sources on your screen, either full-screen or as PIPs.

Blended widescreen is complicated. There are many considerations here, depending on your physical space, budget, and requirements, and I think you’d be well-served to hire an integrator to help you evaluate your options.

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]

That is unexpected. Do you have your comp’s background color set to white? Remember, a black solid will not create a black background in wireframe mode, so the comp background might need to be manually set to black.

You could also try setting your view to wireframe, 100% size, full resolution, and then Composition > Save as > Photoshop Layers. This will create a layered PSD of your viewport with the current settings.

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]

[Keiichi Matsuda] “Is it possible to render out a wireframe version of a 3D comp? or even ‘save frame as’? “

Yes it is. Add your comp to the render queue. In the render queue, go into Render Settings and choose “Wireframe” for the Quality setting.

UPDATE: Stuart, you beat me to 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]

[john isaacks] “You can check the motion blur button for a layer to show a motion blur automatically when that layer moves. However, it does not work when the layer is not actually moving but a camera is moving past it. “

Sure it does — but the static layer has to be 3D to respond to the camera, it has to have its own motion blur switch ticked, and motion blur must be enabled on the comp.

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 check out this thread, too:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/962945

You only want to use an up-res plugin on raster footage elements; it’s better to scale your vectors and type in 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

[Walter Soyka]

[duprelon tizdale] “but what projection software available for windows shows ProRes in .Mov….”

Do you have the ProRes decoder for Windows installed? It’s not included with the standard Quicktime installation, and must be downloaded separately from Apple.

With that QT component installed, anything that uses the Quicktime libraries should be able to read your ProRes files.

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]

[duprelon tizdale] “I have winXp ,vista, and win7, linux, and Mac machines. “

Then ProRes is not for you — it’s Mac/Windows only.

You could transcode your ProRes movies to MPEG2 with Compressor (ships with Final Cut Studio on a Mac) or another conversion program like Episode, Squeeze, or ProCoder.

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