[Walter Soyka]

I generally use 4.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

Adjustment layers do not apply their effects to all the layers below them; they apply effects to the composite of all the layers below them. It’s similar to precomposing them and applying the effect to the comp.

If you want to apply the same set of effects to a bunch of layers, copy them from the first layer and use Paste with Property Links on the other layers. It will link the pasted effects to the original effect, so changing the values of the first effect will also change them on the others.

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 use an expression. Alt+click on the stopwatch icon for the position property, then paste in this code:

if (numKeys > 1) {
if (time < key(1).time) loopIn("continue")
else loopOut("continue");
} else value;

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

[Walter Soyka]

GoPro CineForm. It’s a fantastic intermediate/mezzanine codec.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry, Felipe, I don’t quite follow what you’re sharing.

Is the second (messed-up) image what happens when you import the Animation codec file, or what happens when you composite 4 of them on top of each other with the Add blend mode?

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

[Walter Soyka]

What are your system specs? What’s the resolution of your comp? Are you previewing at some resolution other than Full? Does anything special happen at frame 25 (new layers, effects, keyframes, values, etc.)? Have you tried turning off all effects and then turning them back on one at a 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]

Your hot glow there looked like a 32bpc effect. I think there’s a bug in dynamic link’s color profile conversion from Ae to Pr/AME with super-bright values, well over 1.0, especially in the blue channel. This can only happen with floating point color (32bpc); neither of the integer color depths (8bpc and 16bpc) can encode a color brighter than white.

What “Clip to Output White” does is eliminate super-bright values. Anything brighter than 1.0 will be clipped to 1.0. You don’t want to use this in the middle of your comp, because your glow/blur is actually relying on those super-bright values to produce that cool blue tone, but we can put it on an adjustment layer on top without affecting the visual, because our monitors cannot display a color brighter than white (1.0) anyway.

To see what it’s doing for yourself, toggle the effect on and off, and move the mouse cursor around over the comp viewer with the Info panel open. You’ll see exactly how the Levels effect clips the RGB values of the pixels.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Is your project set to 32bpc and exporting via dynamic link to Media Encoder?

Try this: apply a Levels effect on an adjustment layer at the top of your comp. Don’t touch the histogram, the inputs, gamma or outputs — just set “Clip To Output White” to “On.”

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] “I can’t agree that after CC 2014, the performance is better using AE and PPro 😛 Too much to negatives to bother with.”

I think I need to clarify, because I largely agree with you! My final renders on Ae CC 2018 (without Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously) are slower than Ae CC 2014 (with RMFS and a big workstation with lots of CPU cores and lots of RAM).

My point is more that my renders on Ae CC 2018 are faster than my renders on Ae CC 2015 were.

Ae CC 2014 was carrying a lot of technical debt — two decades of architectural decisions that had to be changed to allow modernization going forward. That’s what Ae CC 2015 was; the first step of a significant architectural update (which has also seen significant rework since then).

Now that we’re 25 years into multimedia on computers, a lot of applications have this exact problem. Some just give up and start over, like FCP7 vs FCPX, or old-school Premiere vs Premiere Pro). Some rewrite the core with major UX changes, like Resolve or Flame. Some rewrite the core a piece at a time, like Avid Media Composer or Ae. And some don’t make it at all, like Avid/SoftImage DS or XSi.

I wish that work were going faster, but there has been continual under-the-hood progress on the engine, without affecting compatibility or flipping the table on the Ae UX. I appreciate that, and I hope Adobe continues with what they’ve started.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Craig Wall] “Another year of meager ‘updates’ and again Adobe’s once-promised fully mutli-threaded support still no closer to reality. I think it’s safe to say at this point that it won’t ever happen.”

Adobe promised better performance, and every release since 2015 has had some kind of performance improvement. After separating the renderer and the UI with CC 2015 for better interactive performance, Adobe is now working on better render performance with GPU acceleration. Each of the last 6 releases of Ae (every major release since CC 2015.3, v13.8) has put more effects and rendering work onto the GPU. (And the latest release has an all-new, faster expression engine, too, to speed up slow, expression-heavy projects.)

Ae actually is multithreaded (the renderer and the UI are now completely separated, a number of effects are heavily multithreaded, the CINEMA 4D renderer is multithreaded, etc.). They removed the “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” feature because it had some serious limitations. Because it was running multiple renderer instances, each needed their own memory pool, it was easy to run into GPU contention, etc. If you want “Render multiple frames simultaneously” back — and sometimes I absolutely do, too! — take a look at Mekajiki’s RenderGarden [link].

[Dave LaRonde] “Hey, that’s not something that’s new & sexy. Why on Earth would Adobe do something that’s actually practical & useful for every single user?”

More smaller releases (versus fewer, bigger releases) means that there’s no one version of Ae that will be earth-shattering for all of the many different ways people use Ae. But looking over the last few years of development, we’ve seen quite a lot of improvement.

I don’t know what you’re looking for, Dave, but we’re using practical and useful Ae features like Lumetri color, master properties, the keyboard shortcut editor, effect input layer options, compositing options, Refine Edge / Refine Soft Matte / Key Cleaner, and expression access to path properties — not to mention the “boring, little” things like layer snapping, spring-loaded folders, mask mode selection during drawing, render name tokens, property links, the command to move the anchor point to the center of a layer’s content, and automatically-trimmed precomp durations.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list — just the features I can think of off the top of my head that have been especially beneficial to us in our work.

Do I want more? Of course I do. We’re working with real time engines that vastly exceed Ae on performance, but we keep coming back to Ae for its stability, its design tools, its enormous third-party ecosystem, and its Swiss-Army-knife flexibility.

I think that Adobe needs to hear criticism, so that they keep pushing and making their products better. I think Craig’s concern that Ae is still not fast enough is well-founded. I don’t understand sarcastically dismissing all the work that’s been done over the last few years. From the differences in our experiences with Ae, sometimes I wonder if we’re even using the same application! What exactly is it you’d like to see in Ae?

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