[Walter Soyka]

Hey Joe,

I do similar work—largely motion graphics for live events and custom widescreen and multi-screen displays.

The issue with RAID 0 is that a single drive failure will destroy all your data. If you will be working with HDV, you won’t really need RAID 0 for speed. The data rate is 25 mbit/s, the same as DV, so you could get away with a single SATA drive. If you will be working with uncompressed HD, a two-disk RAID 0 set won’t be fast enough. An external RAID 5 array (there are plenty advertised here) will give you both speed and redundancy.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Mike Sussman] “To make “huge” scenes like these, work in a normal comp size but use the camera view to see what would otherwise be way way off screen if it were just 2D”

Exactly.

You can use Red Giant Software’s PlaneSpace to arrange and manipulate all those layers in your video wall — this will make your project a lot easier.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Joe,

I’m curious why you’re specifying RAID 1 with multiple partitions for your boot drive. I imagine you’re interested in the redundancy, but I think it’s a false sense of security. RAID is not a backup; if you delete a file accidentally, it will be deleted on both RAID drives. If a single hard drive fails, you will be protected, but if your RAID controller fails, or if your power supply fails and damages both drives, or if there’s a fire in your facility, RAID will do you no good.

I’d probably eliminate that RAID set. If you are concerned about redundancy, think about an external hard drive and a program like Acronis TrueImage or Norton Ghost to create an image of your installed and configured system.

I would also recommend against partitioning. Partitioning was worthwhile a few years ago when file fragmentation was a show stopper, but modern drives are faster and modern filesystems are smarter. Partitioning will only guarantee more seeks across the disks as data from both partitions is requested without providing much benefit.

Instead, you could still get the two 500 GB drives, and use one for the OS and applications, and the other for media caches and scratch disk. I’d suspect this would actually give you a slight performance boost over a partitioned mirrored RAID set.

Most folks recommend against using OpenGL with After Effects; there are a couple threads on this below yours. OpenGL in AE only affects the user interface; you won’t get a render boost. Spec your card for Max if you will use that, where the viewport performance will make a bigger difference.

As for the striped RAID 0 for the media files — what sort of work do you do?

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Mike,

If you are talking about creating a physical video wall with multiple physical screens, then you will need to create a large comp.

If you are talking about creating a video wall effect on a single screen, then there is no need for the large comp. Just create a comp sized for whatever your delivery requires (i.e., 1920 x 1080). Arrange the “video displays” in 3D space and animate accordingly.

There are a couple ways to do that. You could create a camera and fly around them. You could alternately arrange all the displays, create a null object to control them all, set the null as the parent of each of the displays, and then animate the null in 3D space. All the displays would stay “linked” and animate as if they were one element. Finally, you could pre-comp them in a large comp as you have suggested, and animate the pre-comp in your working comp (with or without collapse transformations on, depending on your needs).

Whatever method you choose, I’d keep the working comp at delivery size.

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

[Walter Soyka]

What about renting a DDR for the event? Grass Valley’s Turbo uses 25 Mb/s MPEG2 natively for HD material, and can import a wide variety of digital video formats.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Have you considered recompressing your MPEG2 and AVI files as WMV so you can use the software that you’ve already found?

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

[Walter Soyka]

Keynote does a great job playing video in presentations, but there are some important limitations that may be show stoppers for some applications. In this case, the poster wouldn’t get transport controls on the main monitor.

A couple other Keynote video gotchas: there is no visible timecode to the operator, so you can’t count out of the video. The first frame of video sometimes holds while the computer loads the video file, so you may want to start in black. Slide transitions only work before a video starts and after it ends (essentially a single-channel switcher). You do have access to a slide sorter in presentation mode, but it’s not a proper playlist; you’ll see the first frame of the video, but the clip name or any other information about it.

As Thomas mentioned, Playback Pro is an outstanding software DDR. It’s purpose-built for this sort of work.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi John,

Just for your reference, when you call aerender.exe without passing any parameters, it will print a message on how to use it and then immediately quit.

Instead of running aerender.exe from Start > Run, run “cmd” instead. In the command line, launch aerender.exe and it will explain its usage.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Kownacki] “Don’t think that because your invoice looks like a work of art it will get paid any faster or they will hire you for more jobs. Beancounters look at the number, make sure it’s correct and type in into quickbooks as a payable and file it away.”

I think Steve is right that an invoice need not be a work of art, but it is still an important piece of business communication that shouldn’t be overlooked. Invoices should be designed for clarity, and this includes both the invoice template and the way your write up your invoices.

Put yourself in your clients’ shoes. What would you want in an invoice that you are paying out against? I want to be able to pick out instantly the vendor the invoice is coming from, the project the invoice is for, and the total due. I want the line item charges to be clear, I want the terms to be clear, and I want to easily reference and reconcile it against a PO or an estimate. I want to feel I am being charged what I expected. I don’t want to see surprises, and I don’t want to have to ask questions. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time making sure the charges are correct.

You want to make it easy for your clients to write you checks, not harder. A pretty invoice won’t help, and a cluttered or incompletely written invoice won’t help, but a clear and functional invoice (which in my opinion certainly includes the stock invoice templates in Quickbooks) will.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Alex,

I understand your frustration with the creative options in Watchout, but I think you’ll find that all the solutions in its class have similar weaknesses; they are essentially media servers/compositors, rather than content creation tools. I’ve found Watchout to be pretty stable, though—what sort of reliability issues are you having?

AVStumpfl makes Wings Platinum, a product very similar to Watchout—perhaps this is the product you were asking about before. I think you’ll find its architecture, strengths, and weaknesses are quite similar to Watchout’s.

If you haven’t used Watchout 4 yet, you should check it out. There are some big improvements over v3 in content creation, including compositions, auxiliary timelines, and show control. Timeline layering has been inverted, too, so items on the top layers of the timeline are composited on top of the image, just like in Photoshop and After Effects. Version 4.1 is expected to include blend modes. If Dataton ever added a titler, that would go a long way to addressing my frustrations in designing Watchout.

That said, my Watchout workflow is pretty much the same as yours—a lot of After Effects, a little bit of Watchout. I haven’t found any standalone product that gives me the power of AE in realtime, synched over multiple displays.

One option that’s not commonly suggested is Apple’s Quartz Composer, a node-based visual programming language. It’s used to make all of Apple’s screen savers, iChat effects, and iMovie effects and transitions. It’s probably not suitable for structured storytelling, but it could be an option if your content is eye candy. It’s very powerful, realtime, and network-aware, but I’ve found the learning curve to be pretty steep. Also, I’m not sure it will address your screen-warping without additional programming.

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