[Walter Soyka]

If your footage is interlaced and you’re trying Twixtor, check out Marco Solorio’s article on deinterlacing for Twixtor here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/solorio_marco/twixtor_review.php

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Alan Lloyd] “Laptops are not DDR’s, and should not be treated as such. Use the right tool for the job.”

High-spec laptops can be DDRs, but you’re right about using the right tool. Playback Pro runs beautifully on Macbook Pros, especially with external RAID arrays. I’d rather have PBP on my show than DVD playback, and I actually prefer PBP over Turbo in most cases.

Of course, it’s even more capable on a high-spec desktop.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Dave, I know it’s off-topic, but I’d like to nominate Don’t Use AE to Compress h.264 as Stock Answer #3.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Dustin Muncy] “After talking with them, it seems that they will be going through a Macbook Pro, and hooking that up to a projector.”

Have you gotten any guidance on what they expect you to deliver? Do they know what software they will use to play it back, and do they have a preferred file format/codec for playback?

Also, if they are only planning on bringing one MBP, I’d suggest providing them some backup media, just in case. We always run playback together on two machines, a primary and a backup, whether they are computers, DDRs, DVDs, or even good ol’ tape decks. If the primary glitches or freezes, we just switch to the other source, and nobody’s evening is ruined. You might consider supplying a backup as a video DVD.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Thanks, Kathlyn. I hope I can be of help here!

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

[Walter Soyka]

I’ll add my voice to those suggesting a spam filter. I use MX Logic (through my mail provider), and it’s quite nice. I get a daily email with a list of messages blocked, so I can verify at a glance that there were no false positives.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Before you decide how you are going to finish the piece, you should find out more about how it will be displayed.

A couple questions: what aspect ratio will projection be? Do you know for certain that it’s 4:3, or should you be targeting 16:9 instead? What will the playback device be, and what is your exact deliverable?

Working with projection is related to, but somewhat different than, broadcast design. Here are a couple notes that might help you.

All modern projectors are progressive, whereas NTSC is interlaced. The gamuts are not identical, but good engineers on-site will minimize color or gamma issues. Projection, rear projection especially, is prone to hot spots, so flat fields of color may not reproduce as you intend. If the projected image is especially big, exceptionally fast moves may be exaggerated. You do still need to consider the action-safe area, just as you would with traditional video work, as sometimes projection is overscanned.

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

[Walter Soyka]

The titling looks pretty straightforward, so I’ll assume you’re talking about the background.

I see three things going on:

• Some of the shapes write-on (see this Cow tutorial on growing elements)
• Some shapes pop on (with simple scale/opacity keyframes)
• Some regions of shapes seem to wipe on (perhaps a circular, feathered iris)

It’s a lot of work. You have to cut the background into many layers for each of those effects. The design in the example you gave is very regular, though, so they were probably able to reuse elements.

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

[Walter Soyka]

For noise removal, I prefer Innobits Video Purifier, but that’s currently Mac-only (though a Windows version is in development).

You might have some luck with Neat Video—I used to use their still-image plugin for Photoshop with good results.

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

[Walter Soyka]

I will attempt to deftly avoid a platform flame war by saying this — I’ve got both Macs and PCs in my shop, and the hardware never drives my choice. For me, it’s all about the tool chain.

Adobe and Cinema 4D run on both platforms, so that’s a wash. I like Final Cut Studio, which of course is Apple-only, so edits and color correction happen on Macs. I design presentations, so anything that’s Keynote-based happens on Macs, but anything that’s PowerPoint-based happens on PCs. A lot of the specialty software that I use (Dataton Watchout, Vista System’s Spyder controller, Ventuz) are PC-only. Many Autodesk packages are PC-only, or PC-preferred.

So what are your needs? Are there other software packages besides AE you’ll rely on?

Do you have particular codecs that you need to work with? MPEG 2 and 4 are cross-platform, AVID is cross-platform, and WMV is available cross-platform, but if you’re working with FCP-based editorial houses that want ProRes, you’ll have to go Mac, because the Windows version is decode-only.

No matter which platform you choose, 64-bit is here to stay now, and if you’re getting a new system, you’ll want multiple cores, loads of RAM, and a 64-bit OS to let you use it all.

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