Walter Soyka
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Just a quick correction to my previous post: 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 refer to chroma subsampling, not color spaces.
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 -
The file size shouldn’t alarm you. Quality requires disk space.
XDCAM EX is intended for acquisition only; the files are heavily compressed, in a 4:2:0 color space. Avid DNxHD is relatively lightly compressed, and in a 4:2:2 color space. DNxHD is far better suited for mastering than XDCAM EX is.
What do you need to do with the file next? Play out to tape? Make Blu-rays? DVDs? Web video?
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 -
[Jason Brown] “I don’t know that any video cards on a laptop support native playback through VGA at 1920×1080. You’ll likely experience *computer* resolutions like 1024×768.”
Great point. DVI might be preferred for using the native resolution. There’s also PowerStrip, a great utility for adding custom resolutions on Windows.
[Jason Brown] “If you are playing back at a supported resolution of the monitor and supported output of the video card and it fills the screen, it should be crisp”
Delivering anything other than native resolution to a flat panel display will result in scaling and some artifacting, but how noticeable that scaling will be depends on lots of factors — the scaler itself, the content, the distance from the viewer to the screen, lighting conditions, etc. As Jason notes, if your pre-scaled resolution is close to native, it should still look pretty good.
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 -
[Tony Thijssen] “I can set the frame rate to 29.97 (or 30)”
The ideal frame rate will depend on the refresh rate of the final playback device. I’m in the US, so everything here tends to runs at 60 Hz. 50 Hz, or sometimes 75 Hz, might be more appropriate for other locales.
[Tony Thijssen] “We’re going to use VGA to connect to the monitor, so I could use QuickTime or VCL and run it in full screen. “
Computers usually drive their displays at an even 60 Hz, rather than NTSC-legacy 54.94, so if you’re using a computer to play back, you might choose to work in an even frame rate. The difference will be extremely negligible, so if you are also delivering for future video use, you can safely keep it at 29.97.
You might consider Blu-ray delivery and playback instead of computer playback. In either scenario, you should have a live backup running on-site.
[Tony Thijssen] “I’m concerned though that it will look blurry and not as crisp on this monitor if I use the same comp size as current PSD file (1376×774). But I’m not sure, it might work.”
If you’re going from 1376×774 to 1920×1080, it will scale, and therefore soften or pixelate some. Whether it’s acceptable or not is up to you and your client. If your own monitor is 1920×1080 or higher, you can try it out on your desktop to get a rough idea as to what it will look like.
Depending on the viewing distance, it might be noticeable, or it might not be.
For video, I recommend working in 1920×1080 from the beginning and scaling down during compression at the end of the process, if necessary, to avoid the problem you’re facing now.
[Tony Thijssen] “Unfortunately I can’t test before the start of the tradeshow.”
You should try to test as best you can; if the client is providing the laptop to play the video on, is it powerful enough to play HD? Better to find out now, while there is still time to make a backup plan!
[Tony Thijssen] “I also could set up my comp as 1280×720, frame rate 29.97 and create the final output on a DVD that will be played from the computer. May be that will give a better result…?”
Same as above, this will scale up on the display and soften some. DVD is limited to standard def, so your project would only be 480p at best.
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 -
[Donato M. Rondinelli] “For FCP & AE, what’s more important, RAM or processors?”
I see that this post is already a week old, so I’m somewhat late to the party, but I though I’d add that for After Effects, more processor cores are useless without lots of RAM. You want a minimum of 2 GB per core. For an 8-core machine, you’ll want at least 16 GB of RAM.
If you have less RAM than this, your AE renders might actually be faster without multi-processing.
With multi-processing enabled, AE launches several copies of itself in the background. Each instance works on a frame at a time, and each instance requires its own memory space for footage and layer caches. AE is still 32-bit, so each instance is limited to 4 GB. Of course, the operating system and any other applications you may have open will also want RAM, so the more, the merrier.
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 -
Jason is absolutely correct — playback will determine your comp settings.
That said, the display should determine playback. If the display is 1920×1080, then that’s the ideal playback resolution, and anything else will be scaled.
I’m curious as to why you’ve chosen to work in 24p; my first inclination would be to use an even multiple or divisor of the refresh rate of the playback system (like 30 or 60 fps for computer video, but please verify). Motion graphics in 24p can look a bit jumpy if you’re not very careful in the design, especially on larger monitors.
As a final note, my work is primarily live events such as this, and we would never run any playback system without a redundant backup — computers are more and more reliable, but they can still crash, and you don’t want a computer crash to ruin your booth. If your clients are not already planning for a backup playback system, you might want to suggest it to them.
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 -
Does it help if you precompose the layer after adding the color keys and invert alpha, but before the blur and matte choker?
Also, this might be easier to do on the shading itself, instead of the composited final. Do you have the animation in layers somehow?
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 -
[Chris Blair] “Most business people I know understand that as long as someone is working hard, trying to find information, and making a sincere effort to get the job done, there’s not much more you can ask of them.”
Just to elaborate on this point a little more — from your boss’s perspective, you don’t necessarily learn much about a vendor or an employee when a project goes well. When the wheels fall off, though, and you see how they respond to a crisis, you learn who you can really trust.
If you panic, shut down, avoid the work, and pass the buck, then you will fail — but as Chris mentioned, this is clearly NOT the path you’re on.
If you avoid panic,clearly identify the problem and consequences, keep communication open and honest, marshall whatever resources are at your disposal, develop and execute a plan to fix the problem as best you can, and come up with a plan to avoid the problem in the future, then you earn trust.
No matter what your line of work is, things both inside and outside of your control are eventually going to go wrong. It’s how you respond to Murphy’s Law that differentiates you from your peers.
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 -
[Gonçalo Perdigao] “But is bad not to be able to render a graphic with a blending mode that have an alpha”
The reason you can’t bake the blend mode into the graphic is because the blend mode actually changes pixels in the graphic based on the elements below it; if you change those other elements, your graphic must also change, and the “baked” graphic would be incorrect.
[Gonçalo Perdigao] “when u are working with different people that aren’t in the same place as you, you must send the the AE Collect file, or the render already flatten with the graphic. What method do you use when you are in a situation like this one?”
Can’t you and your team agree to share the graphic with alpha and each of you change the blend mode properly in your own projects?
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 -
This look is exactly what the technique I described above will do — though I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this effect as well.
Once you get all the parameters in the ballpark for a good look for your footage, you can save the whole stack of effects as an animation preset. Then all you will have to do to re-use it is duplicate the layer for each set of colors you want to blend, apply your custom preset, and pick the new colors with the Color Keys’ pickers.
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