[Walter Soyka]

I think you’d be better off just using Rotobrush from the beginning. The masks in your new file have 20,000+ points per mask, per frame — there’s no way to meaningfully edit these as paths, and there’s no way to import any external data into the Rotobrush tool (which uses its own engine for following edges).

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

[Walter Soyka]

Looking at the video, there’s a ton of chatter in the edges. I can’t imagine this would actually be usable in production without a lot of cleanup — and the masks themselves are 10,000+ points, so cleaning by hand would not be practical at all. If this really meets your needs, you may as well get mattes instead of masks.

I would think Clearvid would want to develop this script if they want their output to be useful for Ae users (though again, I don’t think that those masks would be valuable at all). Have you contacted them?

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’d suggest doing the noise reduction first, then coloring afterwards — you should get better NR results, better keying/secondaries when coloring, and I’d think you’d be more likely to want to tweak color after the fact than you would want to tweak noise reduction.

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’d think about the i7 processor instead of i5, and yes, as much RAM as you can afford.

You should see a pretty noticeable improvement in load times from the iMac’s flash storage (instead of the mechanical HDDs in the 2012 Mac Pros).

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

[Walter Soyka]

There’s no documentation for prefs I’ve ever seen. Think of that prefs file like an old map: there be dragons! Maybe you can sail through easily, but maybe you’ll get eaten.

Make backup copies, and be ready to reset the preferences if Ae starts acting strangely after you experiment. Corrupt preferences can cause bizarre issues.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Check the Duration value in the Paint panel when you activate the Clone Stamp tool.

To adjust the duration of strokes after the fact, select the layer in the timeline, hit PP (that’s the P key, twice), and adjust the bars in the paint stroke mini-timeline.

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 can pre-render [link] or proxy [link] any time you want, but I would recommend leaving everything in your comp live all the time.

Pre-rendering means that change management becomes more difficult; some changes could require you to go back to the beginning, make a set of changes, render, import, and then make additional changes on top of the new render.

If you need to work a little faster, here are some performance tips (especially the last three sections):
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html

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

[Walter Soyka]

Adam, your example is more complicated because you are using expressions to drive multiple position properties from one single location.

Something like this ought to work for you:
motionLayer = thisComp.layer("Motion Path 1");
keyframeLayer = thisLayer;

keyframeEffectProp = keyframeLayer.effect("Progress")("Slider");
motionLayer.transform.position.valueAtTime(linear(keyframeEffectProp, 0, 100, keyframeEffectProp.key(1).time, keyframeEffectProp.key(keyframeEffectProp.numKeys).time));

The first two lines are important. They set up where the expression will look for position values and our keyframed “Progress” slider.

As written above, leave motionLayer set as it is, and put the animated Progress slider control on each individual layer. If you want to refer to one Progress slider from multiple layers, modify that keyframeLayer reference (line 2) to indicate whatever layer actually has the Progress effect.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Dmitriy Ivanov] ” I’m thinking about upgrading from i7-7700k to i9-9900k for better real-time preview performance in AE. I’m barely interested in render time. How much faster will previewing be?”

Also worth noting: in most cases, previewing IS rendering.

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

[Walter Soyka]

// move myItem object into the project's root folder
myItem.parentFolder = app.project.rootFolder;

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