[Walter Soyka]

[Joel Arvidsson] “How comes more ram does does not lengthen you Ram prewievs? is this a 32 bit limitation? “

Exactly right. AE can only use RAM from its foreground process to fill the RAM cache.

The next version of AE will be 64-bit only, so longer previews will be possible.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

The Matrox MXO2 is a video IO device — it will let you preview your AE work on a broadcast monitor. You can also use a DV deck connected with Firewire, or another capture card like an AJA Kona or BMD Decklink, by using the Video Preview feature.

It will not affect your render time at all.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “The one single thing that can speed up After Effects is to give the application enough RAM to work efficiently. Can you do that on those iMacs? If not, then you will indeed be frustrated”

I agree about the importance of RAM. The graphics card will have no impact on AE at all, so you can skip the ATI card and get 8GB of RAM instead.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

There have been many posts on this topic in the last couple weeks. See these for more details:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/966941
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/967094
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/967562

Here’s the relevant Adobe help page, too.

To summarize, the current release of After Effects is a 32-bit application, which can access a maximum of 4GB of RAM (approx. 3GB as the foreground process on Mac OS X).

AE has an option called multi-processing which enables it to launch multiple instances of itself to render frames; each instance can individually access 4GB of RAM. On an 8-core Mac, you could use up to 32GB of RAM during rendering. I recommend at least 2GB of RAM per core (16GB total, in your case) but prefer 4GB per core so you can still use the workstation for other things while AE is working. Less than 2GB can cause multi-processing to run very slowly.

Again, all that extra RAM will only impact AE during preview and rendering. It will not speed up your user interface, it will not accelerate effects within a single frame, and it will not lengthen your RAM previews.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

That looks like a great tip — please let us know if it works out for you.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “With an image sequence, you simply pick up the render at the next frame… until the next crash, or until you opt for slower renders, learn how to utilize RAM in AE, or get more RAM.”

Another big advantage for rendering to image sequences: if you make a small tweak, it’s trivial to re-render only the changed frames, instead of working around it with proxies or re-rendering the entire sequence.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

That looks like it should do it, though I’ve never heard of that brand.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Using DVI or HDMI means you need something more sophisticated than a simple DA. Gefen makes some nice DVI products, and I believe they have an HDMI splitter that might suit you.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

That’s exactly how it should work, but remember to double-check that Continuously Rasterize is checked for each vector layer.

What’s more, if you up-res each of your video clips individually, replace the SD clips with the new up-ressed HD clips in your DV PAL sequence and scale them back down to fit in as the originals did, Collapse Transformations will preserve your resolution. In other words, a 400% blowup of a 25% reduction will look like the original at 100%, instead of a hideous pixellated mess.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

If they will accept NTSC DV from you, and you can deliver that with your camcorder, then you’re set. If you can only do MiniDV, and they won’t accept that, then you could still lay it off to MiniDV, and a have a service bureau dub to Beta.

Make sure you have and meet all the delivery specs so your tape doesn’t get rejected when it goes through quality control.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production