[Walter Soyka]

After Effects can handle huge comps — up to 30,000 by 30,000 pixels.

Perhaps your work area is accidentally set to only the first frame? In your timeline, go to the first frame you need and hit B. Go to the last frame you need, and hit N.

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

[Walter Soyka]

If your edit machine has multiple cores and lots of RAM, you’d see a big rendering benefit from the Multiprocessing option, which I believe was added in CS3.

Adobe offers a 30-day downloadable trial, so you could try it out and see if you think it’s worthwhile.

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

[Walter Soyka]

I’ll second the recommendation for Keynote. You can use the in-show slide sorter to jump to any piece of content you need.

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

[Walter Soyka]

I wasn’t quite clear on what you meant by “bend options” — if you mean geometry correction or image warping, yes, Watchout does that.

Adding HD video to a Watchout timeline is no problem, provided that your display computers can handle it. Watchout’s capabilities scale with your hardware. Either WMV or MPEG2 are preferred for video playback.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Andrei,

Ordinarily, you’d have a video switcher with keying capability, feed the graphics to the switcher as a separate source, and let it add in the graphics for you; it’d also be possible to get a standalone video “logo inserter” that would do the same thing, downstream from your video switcher.

That said, I assume from your posts that your event is pretty straightforward and budget-constrained — one camera, one projector, and nothing else. Please correct me if I am wrong!

So if your question is, “How can I use my Macbook Pro to add a static graphic over live video from my DVX100a?” then the answer is a product like Boinx TV (if you want a well-packaged solution) or Quartz Composer (if you want to create your own, a la Max or Jitter).

That said, there are a couple other considerations.

Redundancy is vital in live events! I always run backups for computer sources on live events. Ideally, if you do use your computer for this, you would have a second computer running the same thing and a video switcher in case your main computer crashes. If you insist on using only one Mac, you should also send video directly from the camera to another input on the projector so you are covered in case the computer crashes.

You haven’t mentioned lighting and audio, and both will be important. I don’t know what you’re considering for audio, but you might want to rent an audio delay unit to compensate for the delay in video due to processing in order to preserve lip sync.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Mark,

https://www.aja.com/products/software

Look for AJA TV. (I think it’s on the driver install disc, too.)

You might also be interested in AJA VTR Xchange.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Your video switcher may be able to do this for you, if it has keying capabilities.

We’d need to know more about your setup to help.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Thank you both, Thomas and Will, for the feedback.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Your projector is also 4:3, right? If so, you can just project it as-is.

This projector seems to be an office projector, not any kind of cinema projector. You will probably want to test with it before you screen, so you’ll get an idea as to what the brightness and color rendition will be like.

A G4 could still be fine to use to play out to the projector, especially if you use an “easy” codec like DV and export the movie to a single, self-contained Quicktime file. A DVD player might be less likely to crash during your screening, though.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Do you have a capture card for your FCP system? AJA has a utility that will play Quicktime videos directly to the outputs of their capture cards — I believe Blackmagic Design has a similar utility, too.

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