[Walter Soyka]

[Martin Stacey] ” Banding in grads is something I’m really trying to avoid, so I’m looking for the best solution to get rid of them, and it’s led me to point. A lot of the time I’m going to a deliver codec like HAP, which is really bad with banding, but it seems much better if I render a 16 bit project down to prores 4444 millions of colours, ’cause it introduces the dithering, which then reduces the banding in the final HAP render too.”

Yeah, Hap is pretty notorious for banding, and you fill be fighting this fact for the entire project. You can always introduce a little bit of noise across the whole frame, or try a more nuanced tool like S_Deband from Boris FX / Genarts Sapphire.

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

[Walter Soyka]

This is unfortunately not supported in mogrts. Please consider filing a feature request (I know I have), because this feature is sorely needed.

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

[Walter Soyka]

If you have to have some kind of offset in time between the two comps, you can use .valueAtTime() to get the position at a specific time instead of the current time.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Eric Santiago] “Thanks, Walter was that just added to 2019? Its been a while since I needed to downgrade a file.”

It’s been there — quietly! — for a while. I think the first version that could save back was CS6. It’s usually just a single version back, so sometimes you’d have to open and save down in several versions to get where you wanted to go, but the current release can save back to either v15 or v14 AEPs.

[Eric Santiago] “One error I’m getting is that annoying “after effects error internal verification failure” but mine states “missing options size mismatch”.”

What are you doing when you get that error?

[Eric Santiago] “The other one is that it doesn’t support QT Animation w/alpha.”

There was a bug in the initial release of Ae CC 2019 (v16.0) where alpha didn’t work from Animation/ProRes4444 when the project was set to 16bpc or 32bpc. That’s fixed in the current release, v16.0.1.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Martin Stacey] “If only AE made the dithering function available as a filter it’d solve a lot of banding issues.”

[Martin Stacey] “So it seems the way to get the best looking final delivery render would be to work in 16 bit, but to render to 8 bit depth, not 16 bit. Which seems odd.”

Remember that some of that banding is likely caused by your monitor.

Dithering is not really a filter or effect; it’s an interpolation method. If you want to get the effect in a 16bpc without rendering, you can add an 8bpc effect to force that interpolation. For example, an adjustment layer with an Arithmetic effect applied (the defaults will not affect the image, other than forcing it down to 8bpc) will get you that dithered downsampling.

Note that this will cost you precision; Ae will resample the resulting image back up to 16bpc, but the original 16bpc precision will be lost in this process.

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

[Walter Soyka]

We’ve been using 2019 on high-res projects and haven’t seen crashing. What kind of footage are you using? What effects are you applying? Have you tried switching from GPU acceleration to CPU only?

[Eric Santiago] “Sucks that some of the projects are saved in that version :P”

You can save down to previous versions from Ae CC 2019.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Ae’s memory usage is unrelated to whether you can open that file or not.

Do you get any kind of error message when you open that file? Can you open that file in any other application? Are you sure it’s even a valid footage file, and not a DVD image or something that you would need to mount in your OS and extract files from for Ae?

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

[Walter Soyka]

[gabe de matteis] “The file format is .img and I AE opens them with no problem. But it won’t open the 3.55 gb file. “

Do you get an error message at all?

Where’s this file coming from? I hear .img and I think “disk image,” not a footage format that Ae can use.

[gabe de matteis] “I’ve allocate 21 of my 24 gb ram to AE — still won’t open it??”

I don’t think memory is the problem; I’d advise adjusting that setting back down to leave a little more RAM available to your OS. I would allocate 16 to 18 GB of RAM for Ae on a 24 GB system.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[gabe de matteis] “I have 24 gb of ram — should one have more for larger files?”

It really has nothing to do with the file size. Ae only stores uncompressed video frames in RAM for preview, no matter what format your footage is on disk.

But yes, Ae will use as much RAM as you can give it!

[gabe de matteis] “Along these lines have you experience AE unable to open a large file — I couldn’t open a 3.55 gb file”

We pretty regularly use Ae with files larger than that. What kind of file is it?

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

[Walter Soyka]

The length of your preview is dependent on your comp size, bit depth, frame rate, available memory, and preview settings.

There are a few preview settings you can change to get a longer preview. See here for more:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1135155#1135213

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