[Walter Soyka]

AE calls it “Collect Files.” Here’s the Adobe livedoc 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]

How about shape layers with the puppet tool? The puppet pins are controllable with expressions.

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]

Hopefully by now you’ve gotten some quotes on the repair, but I’d be pretty surprised if it wasn’t more cost effective to buy a new projector.

You could get a much brighter, higher-res projector for the same or less than you spent 6 years ago, and perhaps your insurance would cover the replacement?

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]

Assuming you want your radio towers in 3D, you could model them in 3D Invigorator along with your globe and position them in the scene at the appropriate points.

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’s a lot of cores, and not a lot of RAM.

After Effects launches a separate instance of its renderer for each core in your system, and each instance will require access to plenty of RAM to store the footage, caches, layers, etc.

I recommend 2 to 4 GB per core, so you’d want 16GB at a minimum, plus a 64-bit operating system so your system can access it all.

This may or may not be the cause of your current problem, but more RAM should help speed up your multiprocessing renders 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]

This is outside my realm of expertise, but your developer might be able to write a second program that lays the guide window in over top of the other running applications. The old Adobe apps on Windows used to have irregular, partially transparent splash screens when they loaded, so it’s certainly possible to do.

On the simple fix side, since masking the display won’t work, what about masking the camera lens itself? You could have a circular filter made for your lens size.

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]

Gary, presumably you are using some custom software to take the pictures? Can’t you build this in?

If you’re using something off-the-shelf, perhaps contact the developers about your specific need?

Or what about a low-tech solution — a physical mask around the screen?

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]

Have you deleted the bad frames and re-rendered them? There’s an option in the Render Settings panel to skip existing frames, so if you delete only the offending files and use the same file-naming scheme, it will not re-render the good frames.

Otherwise, maybe open the files on a computer that reads them and re-save into a new directory to force a clean save? I’m not sure what color space you’re working with, but just be on the lookout for any color or gamma shifts if you try this.

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 4:2:2 Uncompressed component is not part of a standard Quicktime install; it’s installed with Final Cut Studio. To avoid installing new codecs on the AE/Windows machine, you’d have to render to a common codec, like Animation or PhotoJPEG.

If your AE vendor will try installing some Quicktime codecs, some folks have had success reading uncompressed Quicktime with the AJA or Blackmagic uncompressed Quicktime codecs, but I haven’t tried it myself.

I suppose you could also render to ProRes, and install the ProRes Decoder for Windows on the AE box. It’s decode-only on Windows, so you’d probably look for animation-codec Quicktime back from your vendor. There are some footage interpretation issues to be aware of; check out this entry on Todd Kopriva’s blog 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

[Walter Soyka]

DVCPRO HD stores 720p images exactly as you’ve described — 960 pixels wide, at 1.33 PAR, instead of 1280 square pixels.

You can work with what you’ve got by clicking the “Toggle Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction button” — it’s underneath the composition viewer window, and looks like a rectangle with a double-headed arrow above it.

Alternately, you could transcode to another format that uses the full raster with square pixels.

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