[Will Cavanagh]

I’m not familiar with the workflow to Avid (I leave that to our Avid guys…) Are you having any specific problems aside from the long import time?

Have you tried posting this in an Avid forum as well? There might be more specific knowledge of good codecs there (although I’m sure some wiz-bang guru will give you a good answer here too.)

–Will

[Will Cavanagh]

Depending on how your comps are structured right now you might be able to precomp your text, and have two layers of text in that precomp, one with all the words, the other with just one. Then just fade between them when it comes time to isolate your one word.

This obviously won’t work if you need to “pull out” the keyword in 3d space. If this is the case, how about duplicating whatever mechanism you have to create your ring of words, except replacing the text source (again precomp this) with one comp with the word missing, and another with just the word.

I don’t know how you have things set up, but this should work out (and be easier to control.)

[Will Cavanagh]

Ouch. It’s the worst when you can’t blame someone else. Something about screaming “someone please find an Adobe developer so I can shoot him” into the hallway is quite therapeutic.

I usually have AE setup to do autosaves in a single directory (on a local disk not used for production) for all my projects. That way, if I ever loose anything or a disk goes I have my project files (I do this for FCP etc. as well.) I also never touch this folder and it “looks” very different (different folder structure) from my project directories so I’m much less likely to overwrite files that are here. When you’re done with a project you can just go through and delete old autosaves and leave a couple milestones for that project.

–Will

[Will Cavanagh]

for this kind of thing I’d look at using Expressions rather than parenting. If you’re more specific with what you want to accomplish I can post some code.

[Will Cavanagh]

When using dynamic link between AE and Premiere, you should save as an AE project, and import the AE project into Premiere. This will essentially render the comp using the AE render engine as needed from Premiere.

While this theoretically will allow a more “dynamic” workflow, I have found it to be more trouble than it’s worth. Because of the weight AE comps add to your Premiere project, it becomes very cumbersome to work in Premiere. I find it most effective to export AVIs for use in Premiere. If you’re not worried about reverting to previous versions, just overwrite the AVI every time you need to make a change. Wait for AE to finish writing to the file, and then switch back to Premiere. It should recognize that the file has changed, regenerate cache files if necessary, and you’re in business. Obviously, this kills the “workflow” touted by Adobe enthusiasts and the Dynamic Link marketing, but I find it to be ultimately more efficient. This is basically the workflow FCP users are forced into anyway.

[Will Cavanagh]

Shoot your actors with chroma-keyable paint wherever you want them to glow. Then use a solid below your (keyed) footage to add the color. If you want some variation in brightness you could use a fractal noise effect on the solid with a hue/saturation below set to colorize to make it a bright color again. Set the contrast fairly low on your fractal noise layer. You can try playing with adding a wiggle() expression to the contrast, evolution, and brightness properties of the fractal noise layer to make the glow feel more dynamic.

If you want to have the suit glow, set up your comp as described above, but set the solid to an alpha inverted trackmatte on the footage layer. Then add a duplicate of the footage layer below. Then you can just add a glow effect to the solid, and have the glow overflow the edges of the chroma key. You may need to precomp your solid before setting it to glow (I’m not in front of AE and I don’t remember how glow fits into the OoO in AE.)

[Will Cavanagh]

I would tend to agree that OpenGL is fairly hit or miss with AE. I find it useful mostly for scrubbing through (there is an option to use it for scrubbing updates only in CS3 and later I believe.) It doesn’t render all effects, and frequently it renders colors incorrectly, but it still provides an idea of timing and where you are in your shot if you’re just quickly scrubbing through.

OpenGL is no where near a viable option for playback to review your Comp, and the idea of OpenGL is not to provide this. To expect it to work as Apple Motion’s use of GPU is unreasonable, Apple uses the GPU directly, and can afford to do this because the variations of hardware that it runs on is a lot smaller than AE (Mac-only product!)

–Will

[Will Cavanagh]

Depending on how things are set up (and what you have going on in your comps) it can work to make a new comp at the res you need to output, put your old comp in it, scale your old comp up, and check the “Collapse Transformations” flag. This can also make things break…

I believe that replacing any footage files (in the Project right click on the footage and choose “Replace File”) with full res sources will work (although you may run into Anchor Point issues in your comps.)

It’s usually a good idea to work in the final res from the start (even if you never RAM Preview at full res), and output proxies for the NLE if they’re doing an offline.

[Will Cavanagh]

You may also want to have the fringing follow the actor as he moves.

I would try motion tracking the actor’s waist, adding a smooth to the track and then wiggling it very slowly and slightly and using this data to influence the position of the alpha matte. If you need specifics on how to do this I can give you a more step-by-step-ish response.

[Will Cavanagh]

What Jason said sounds like a good idea, I would add that you might try a radial blur instead of a fast blur for your top level layer.

–Will