[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Szalapski] “I’m going to take a guess here and say this HD footage is from an HD camera that uses DV tapes, i.e. HDV camera.

From the incomperable Dave LaRonde: Dave’s Stock Answer #1…”

Pierre, if you are in fact using HDV footage, see my recent post from another thread on transcoding to a more palatable format.

Michael, we ought to submit a feature request on this to Adobe: whenever a user imports temporally-compressed footage into a project, Dave’s Stock Answer #1 should appear.

Joking aside, though, it’s very confusing for users that the media imports successfully, looks like all the other footage in the timeline, but only works some of the time.

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]

See the second half of this post, from just a couple threads before this one.

Basically, open up the footage in something that can handle it, like Quicktime Player or MPEG Streamclip, and export it as something else that doesn’t rely on interframe compression. You might use Quicktime with the Animation codec, PhotoJPEG codec, Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, DVCPRO HD, or an image sequence (TIFF or TGA). Use the exported file 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]

You should avoid importing MP4s into After Effects, and transcode to another format before importing to After Effects. Search this forum for “Dave’s Stock Answer #1” and read any of the results written by Dave LaRonde 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]

What you’re describing is doable in After Effects, but is really a job for an NLE (non-linear editor), such as Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, or Avid. After Effects excels in motion graphics, effects, and compositing, but you’ll pull your hair out trying to use it to edit.

You might make the graphics in AE, render them out, and use an NLE to cut all the pieces together.

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’re talking about FCP and Compressor, I assume you are on a Mac. Telestream Episode will allow you to encode a 1400×1050 MPEG2, but I’d want to test the resulting file on your Watchout display computer before committing to MPEG2 delivery.

Watchout also accepts WMV files, and Dataton often recommends WMV over MPEG2 specifically for the added flexibility in file sizes in cases like this. Performance was an issue with hi-def WMV back in the Pentium days, but any reasonably competent Watchout display computer will have no trouble with hi-def WMV today. If you choose WMV, you could either use Flip4Mac on a Mac, or the free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder on PC.

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]

The graphics card in your computer has next to no impact on After Effects performance. If you search through this forum, you’ll quickly see that OpenGL rendering causes more problems than it solves, and nearly everyone, myself included, recommends leaving it set off. You could spend thousands on a high-end graphics card and only get hardware-accelerated drawing of your user interface panels. Unless you need a high-end card for another application (Autodesk 3ds Max, Apple Color, etc), your money would probably be better spent elsewhere. Perhaps you were asking about a video card, like AJA’s Kona, that would let you see your work on a broadcast monitor?

You haven’t told us anything about your system, so it’s hard to identify your bottlenecks and make a recommendation on hardware to improve performance. Are you running a PC or a Mac? What processors? How much RAM? What operating system? What kind of hard drives?

We also don’t know anything about the work you’re trying to do. You’ve mentioned HD footage — what formats? What codecs? What kind of work are you doing with it?

After Effects isn’t designed to be a real-time system, but maybe there are some workflow changes you can make to help you work faster. Are you familiar with changing the resolution and frame rate of your RAM previews? Region of interest? Proxies and pre-rendering?

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]

Vista Systems doesn’t post the software publicly, but you should be able to get it from your rep or from the staging company you’re working with.

Vista has recently posted some training videos in the Support section of their site which you might find useful.

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]

Here’s a PowerPoint plugin that will batch import/export images from a PowerPoint deck — this will make the process Mark described much faster and less error-prone.

https://pptxtreme.com/import_export.asp

Note that it’s built for PowerPoint 2003 and doesn’t support PowerPoint 2007.

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 could still use the Lossless with Alpha output module — FCP will simply render it on the timeline.

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]

If you’ve used After Effects’ Lossless output module, you’ll get a huge file that’s intended to preserve quality — it is not optimized for storage or playback, and will skip frames on most computers.

You should compress this file with a compression application like Sorenson Squeeze, Telestream Episode, Apple Compressor, Apple Quicktime Pro, Windows Media Encoder, or the like.

Your delivery requirements will determine what compression is required, and you can see the Compression Techniques forum here on the COW for more.

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