[Walter Soyka]

I suspect this is a color management issue. Can you post one of the PNGs?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Matthew Woods] “From what I have read, CPU clock speed is important, but AE can’t make use of multiple processor cores anymore, so fewer cores with a faster clock speed are better.”

Though this is the prevailing wisdom online, the truth is more complicated than that. Some things in Ae use multiple cores very well, some things use multiple cores very poorly, and more and more is moving onto the GPU.

With Ae CC 2014 and earlier, more RAM helped with “multiprocessing” — a feature that silently launched multiple copies of the Ae renderer in the background to work on multiple frames at the same time. Each copy of the renderer required its own space in RAM (with its own separate layer caches), so lots of RAM was required. Starting with Ae CC 2015, Adobe has been trying to modernize Ae’s internals without completely blowing up compatibility or UX. This was a step back in some regards, but a step forward in others and hopefully a good base for continued improvements.

We use Render Garden from Mekajiki a lot to emulate that old workflow with the current release of Ae (and with all the high RAM requirements it implies):
https://www.mekajiki.com/rendergarden/

With vanilla Ae today, RAM is mostly used by the cache, so your RAM usage will be driven by a combination of factors: the size of your raster, the bit depth you’re working in, the number of layers in your comp, and the duration of your comp.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

You won’t really be creating a video, so YouTube won’t help. You’ll be creating an app (which I suppose you could distribute through the app store for the devices you target).

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Not with After Effects. You’d need an interactive real-time system to drive that kind of VR experience. You might look into Unity.

https://unity.com/

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

I haven’t run into any issues with long text blocks. Can you post a reduced AEP so we can see what you’re seeing and try to reproduce the issue?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Your source files have 8x as many pixels as your output does. Your render would be considerable faster — up to 8x faster! — if you had set up your project at the output size instead of the source size from the start.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

You need to duplicate not just the one composition, duplicate and relink the comp and all the precomps that it relies on.

Two options:

1) True Comp Duplicator does this with just a couple clicks: https://aescripts.com/true-comp-duplicator/

2) Manually, you can isolate the comp and all dependencies that you need, then reimport it multiple times into your project file. File > Save As…, and choose a new filename for your AEP. Select the comp you wish to duplicate, and with that selection choose File > Dependencies > Reduce project. This will remove everything from your project except the comp you selected and the items upon which it depends. Re-open your original AEP, then import the new reduced AEP to get the independent comp/precomp structure. You can re-import as many independent copies as you’d like

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

No. The PNG codec in QuickTime files was handled by Apple’s old 32-bit QuickTime libraries, which they have deprecated, and which no longer run for any application on current releases of macOS.

Instead of Lossless+Alpha, though, you should be able to use ProRes 4444 (or CineForm) for smaller file sizes.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

But Cassius had a good point above, too — if you don’t want to use master properties, you should arrange all the talent shots back to back in ONE talent comp, then use three identical layers of that precomp with different time-remapping to drive the talent selection.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Nope, you should be able to do this across different layers and properties — but you still have to manipulate either the first or last keyframe in time.

Is it possible you have keyframes selected that are offscreen?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]