[Walter Soyka]

[Martin Stacey] “I understand that AE does an internal dithering at 16bit, but I think maybe something broke in one of the CC updates, cause it looks like 2019 isn’t doing this internal dithering unless you render in millions of colours. “

Ae only dithers when stepping down from a higher bit depth to a lower one. In other words, it’s not switching to 16bpc that activates dithering; after all, that would mean that Ae was arbitrarily degrading your image even though you had selected a higher bit depth!

It’s asking Ae to step a 16bpc image down to 8bpc that activates any dithering, which is precisely what happens when your project is set to 16bpc and you render to Millions of Colors.

Remember that some of the banding you are seeing at 16bpc/Trillions may be caused by your monitor, rather than the actual image itself.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Oliver Peters] “Unless I’m mistaken, unlike ProRes, DNxHD/HR doesn’t allow resolution independence. The codec uses fixed sizes, so you can’t create arbitrary frame sizes, which are essential in certain media worlds, like digital signage.”

The only limit I recall for DNxHR is that the frame height must be an even number, but I haven’t done exhaustive testing to find all the rules.

[Shawn Miller] “Good point, I think Cineform would be a great alternative for just that reason.”

CineForm can support any height, but requires that width be a multiple of 8. (The old CineForm encoders used to get around this with a padding/aperture scheme in QuickTime, but I don’t think the current implementations support this.)

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “But it seems like a card with Open GL would be counter-productive to a card that today’s AE (and other applications) would be able to use effectively.”

All current GPUs support OpenGL. They may also support other graphics/compute APIs like CUDA, DirectX, Metal, OpenCL, and/or Vulkan.

Of course, things WILL get interesting when Apple drops support for OpenGL on macOS; it’s currently deprecated on Mojave and will eventually be removed altogether from a future release.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “t’s too bad for you that Adobe has stopped any further development of Open GL in After Effects. Adobe hasn’t done anything with it since CS6. I would have thought that as someone developing a plugin, you would be aware of that.”

Adobe removed the (bad) OpenGL renderer, but that was about rendering comps, not how plugins create imagery. In fact, a number of very popular GPU-accelerated plugins are powered by OpenGL.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Just be sure to click “Advanced Options” when installing Premiere CC 2019 and unselect “Remove old versions.”

If you’ve already uninstalled an old version, you can re-install it this way:
https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/using/install-previous-version.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]

And holding the Shift key while a project loads will prevent Ae from opening any comps.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Nitai Lev-Oren] “but why use it instead of after effects own encoders?”

After Effects doesn’t directly encode MP4/H.264 anymore. You’d have to use Dynamic Link to Adobe Media Encoder to make H.264 files. AfterCodecs allows you to encode H.264 directly from the render queue.

[Nitai Lev-Oren] “what is the benefit of ffmpeg?”

Speed and quality.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Matt Tarpley] “I don’t need to upgrade to CC19 on my home machine, but I work for a university and was asked to upgrade my work computer’s software to 2019, so I have. Most of my work projects are short-form and relatively quick turnaround, unlike this feature length project that I’m in the middle of, so I’m not too worried about any disasters on those projects. I wish I would have waited to upgrade my work machine but I’ll push ahead while only opening this feature-length project on my home machine. Thanks for asking.”

You can have multiple versions of Premiere installed at the same time. There’s nothing stopping you from installing CC19 for new projects, and maintaining your previous installation for your feature. That should also give you an idea of whether there’s anything in CC19 that might be worth upgrading your feature project for.

[Matt Tarpley] “It feels messy to me to have different versions of a project, but if that is the norm, I’ll push ahead.”

Please make regular backups of your .prproj file, whether you upgrade or not! Stories like this one about crashes and project corruption [link] break my heart because they are completely preventable by backing up or versioning your project file.

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’re used to working in HD, then remember that 4K files have 4x as many pixels — which can make for significantly longer renders than you’re used to.

Long-GOP 4K formats can be quite difficult for your computer to decode quickly — especially if you’re shuttling around a lot. You could do a quick experiment to see if transcoding one or two of those files to a high-quality mezzanine codec (like CineForm, DNxHR, or ProRes) makes them easier for you to work with.

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

[Walter Soyka]

MXF is a container format that can several different codecs — some of which may be easier or harder for your computer to process on-the-fly. Can you be more specific on where these MXF files are coming from, and what kinds of other files you’re comparing them to?

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