[Walter Soyka]

A similar option is screencast.com — I actually found them through their banner ad at the bottom of this forum.

They allow you to make the files public, private, or password-protected. You can turn on an option to show clients a download button. They do not recompress video, so it can be presented in whatever format you choose. You can quickly generate links to send to clients, or you can embed in a web page.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hey Jude,

There may be a couple solutions for this, depending on how interactive the piece is. One is the Matrox TripleHead2Go, which attaches to the video out of your computer (by VGA or dual-link DVI), presents itself to the computer as a single very wide screen, and then splits the output onto three distinct DVI-I or VGA outputs.

https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/

You should test this with your playback computer before committing to this as your solution. I’ve used these units with success, but playing three streams of high-res video is demanding.

Of course, I also always recommend a backup system — if the computer crashes for any reason, you will lose all three outputs, so having a live backup and a VGA or DVI router to do the switchover may save you some pain on-site.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Stitching the image sequence together into a movie will be disk- or network-bound, not CPU-bound, so the speed of the workstation won’t make a big difference.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Joe,

In addition to the plugins, you should make sure you have all the necessary fonts installed on all the necessary render nodes.

When collecting the files for the watch folder, make sure that your number of machines allowed accounts for your multiprocessing settings (i.e., 4 quad machines would be 16).

If a render fails, check the last few frames committed to disk to make sure they are properly rendered (non-blank). Delete any bad frames. Then you just re-add the comps to the queue, re-collect to the network, and it will skip all the previously rendered frames

Your performance will probably depend on how beefy your server is, because AE’s network renderer is unsophisticated. It’s pretty easy to tie up the disks or saturate your network when you’ve got multiple render nodes each looking for the next frame to render, then pulling the footage it needs for the frame, then writing it back out.

If you have several sequences to render, it might be faster for you to collect the files onto your render nodes directly, with each node watching a folder on a directly-attached drive, and have each node work on one sequence at a time, locally. If it’s just one sequence, you could split it up manually by setting different start and end frames, then manually collect them all into a single folder to create your Quicktimes. It’s extra manual to set up and finish, but you will save time by not creating a bottleneck at the server or network.

I always use image sequences for my renders, whether they are network renders or not, because if you have to make a tweak, you only need to re-render the affected frames and recreate the QT movie from the image sequence. Again, it’s a couple extra steps, but it really saves time on lengthy renders.

If you’ve got time, I’d suggest you take an old project and run a test of both the above scenarios to see which is really faster with your setup.

Good luck,

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Ty,

The command line renderer is aerender, located in the After Effects CS3 folder. If you run it from the Terminal, it will show you the use of the arguments.

It doesn’t support watch folders, but you can tell it what comp in the project or item in the render queue to render. The setting to skip existing files is built into the Multi-Machine Sequence output module template, so you should be able to point your render nodes at the same shared storage.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Jacob,

You might look into a security switcher if you just want to bounce back and forth among the two analog video feeds.

Another option is a device from Leightronix’s NET series. They feature programmable video/audio switching and DVD control. I am consulting on an installation where we’re upgrading from a Leightronix MINI-T-NET and stack of DVD players to a media server. The MINI-T-NET has been a workhorse for them, and they were very happy with its reliability and performance.

One of the advantages of the higher-end models is the ability to play a specific title and chapter off a DVD disc (from a supported player) which would allow you to play day-part specific content on schedule — maybe different versions of the logo animation for morning, afternoon, and evening.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Jacob,

What do you intend the second feed to display? In the barflynetworks example you gave, you saw a digital signage system taking a video and adding in dynamic content, pulled from a server on the Internet or the signage network.

Are you looking to put two pieces of your own pre-rendered media onscreen at the same time, or one piece of pre-rendered media and dynamic content?

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

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Roger,

What other cues do you intend to drive from the presentation?

Wings Platinum from AVStumpfl is a product similar to Watchout, but I don’t use it and I’m not sure on pricing. It would still require one computer per display, so it may not result in big savings.

I mentioned synchronized DVD playback earlier — this is possibly the least expensive way to run the wall.

You could replace as many of the individual Watchout display computers with DVD players (loaded with pre-rendered content and controlled by a synchronizer) as you like. Whatever smaller Watchout cluster remains could chase the DVD players and handle show control, as well as let you quickly update content on those individual displays only (ie, highlight new inductees).

You could also replace all the displays with DVD players, and just use a single machine for show control, be it Dataton, Medialon, or something else entirely.

An industrial DVD player is probably roughly a quarter of the cost of a Watchout license and a display computer.

Walter Soyka
Keen Live, Inc.
Digital Media Design & Technology

[Walter Soyka]

As long as it’s Windows XP Pro 64-bit Edition, yes, it works the same way. Sorry, but I’m not sure about any differences between XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit.

After Effects CS4 was just released, and it’s 32-bit, so I’d imagine it’ll be quite a while before Adobe releases a 64-bit edition.

If you’re interested in increasing your working speed, you should check out Nucleo Pro from Gridiron Software. It runs the After Effects renderer in the background while you work, and it’s got some time-saving features like spec RAM preview and spec render, commit to disk, and background rendering.

Walter Soyka
Keen Live, Inc.
Digital Media Design & Technology

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Ross,

The answer is yes and no. AE is a 32-bit program, and thus limited to 3GB of RAM — sort of. The limitation is per process, so on a 64-bit OS like Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista 64-bit editions, AE can launch multiple processes to speed up rendering.

While you’ll be limited to 3GB during your designing (the UI runs in one process only), you’ll notice a big speed increase in rendering with a multi-core system and a lot of RAM. For example, an 8-core Mac Pro can launch 8 individual render processes, running one on each core, but to maximize your speed, you’ll still want 2-3 GB per process, or 16-24 GB total system RAM.

Walter Soyka
Keen Live, Inc.
Digital Media Design & Technology