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Noob question: In AE (I have CS4) what's the preferred workflow for progressively adding effects to a layer? Like let's say I've got a PNG sequence of a space ship animated in a 3D program, and I want to make it look nicer. So I (1) do levels, curves, etc. And then I duplicate that layer, (2)do more levels or a threshold effect, blur it and set to Lighten to get some fake light bloom. And then I think it looks good so I want to put some (3) motion blur on the ensemble. Currently I take the layers from (1) and (2), hide all other layers, and render it as another PNG sequence. Which I then bring back in to the comp and apply the motion blur to. I get the feeling this is like saving out specific layers in Photoshop and then importing them instead of just merging them. I have only a vague understanding of what "pre compose" does, and less of what "pre render" is. The reason I don't mind doing things that way is that it lets me keep my individual layers if I decide something is off later (I can adjust and re-render), and also because I'm not handling super intense files that take ages to render. Help me be less dumb. Also, what's the preferred final render file type? I've been saving things as .mov when I'm done, but those are some big files. I assume you'd also do some compression etc, and I have Media Encoder, but I know absolutely nothing about that either beyond recognizing file types. I have two use cases - optimizing for Vimeo and handing off to an editor who'll integrate it in to a documentary.
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Dec 19, 2014 01:15
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You are taking the long way around with all this. Precompositing - or precomp or nesting (all the same thing) is basically combining all of your layers into a new timeline that you can then add another effect on top of what has already been applied, but be able to adjust this independent to the rest. And yes you can pre-comp a pre-comp and add as many layers of effects as needed. So in this case you'd have your main composition with your levels and curves applied to them, but instead of exporting this out as a PNG sequence you select that group of layers, tell it to be a precomp, then apply the motion blur effect or anything else onto that new layer. You can still double click that precomp to edit the individual effects on each layer. But this is really the bare bones. there's a ton more info here that explains the tricks you can do and ways to sort it out.
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Dec 19, 2014 01:58
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Warning about Nesting in Premiere or any NLE. Be careful. You'll have to unnest everything if you want to work with a sound mixer or a colorist. Also, If you're starting to go down the road of needing lots of pre-comps, you might want to start looking at Fusion or Nuke. Node based compositing makes doing complex stuff like that much easier. Instead of setting complicated pre-comps you're just linking nodes.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:16
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WebDog posted:You are taking the long way around with all this. Also a trick I somehow went years without noticing (or maybe it's fairly new) is that pressing tab while in a comp will bring up a little upstream/downstream prompt (at the location of the mouse) to quick navigate between comps.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:07
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Is there anything I can use to burn a loving m2v + ac3 on DVD on a windows 8 pc these days? Encore's dead and Nero can't do it, ugh it's so annoying. I don't want to spend $100 on toast titanium for my dad's Christmas present to my grandparents, and I know nothing of PC software. (Before you ask, I did a custom bitrate export out of premiere pro, which he was editing in, so that I could fit 150 mins on a dvd5, that's why I need the demuxed audio/video, because I can't have anything else re-transcoding.)
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Dec 23, 2014 16:46
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RaoulDuke12 posted:Is there anything I can use to burn a loving m2v + ac3 on DVD on a windows 8 pc these days? Encore's dead and Nero can't do it, ugh it's so annoying. I don't want to spend $100 on toast titanium for my dad's Christmas present to my grandparents, and I know nothing of PC software. If you have Premiere CC you should be able to get Encore CS6 yeah? I know it's discontinued, but for a while at least you could still download it with the Premiere CS6 install.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:57
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Yeah that's kind of a gray area because he's on a 30 day trial of cc, but I'll look into it.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:58
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Hopefully you guys can help me with this- I have a lot of HD video content that needs to be uploaded. About 250 GB worth, and growing. We're looking for a service that allows us to share/stream HD video in a secure and private manner with our colleagues. We'd also like that service to double as a back-up for our videos, so it's really important that we can download our back-ups just as easily as we can upload them. I was considering Vimeo for this, but even their PRO Account upload limits may not be sufficient, for us. I also don't know how reliable they are for backing up videos. Any suggestions for an online service that allows us to easily share video content, while functioning as a reliable back-up service? I was considering Wistia or Vzaar but don't know anyone who has ever used them. melon cat fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 20:39
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Dropbox is the easiest, and their api hooks into Vimeo pretty nicely.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:52
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Wistia is great. One of our big clients, Bomgar, turned us on to them and we're starting to use them more and more. Great for collaboration, white label player and analytics. But I think it transcodes everything yeah? So not so great as a backup service. Wiredrive will do that (I'm pretty sure it can keep "masters") but is expensive as gently caress... so I guess it depends on your budget. Also I couldn't stand Wiredrive's interface. Like, it's legitimately atrocious. I'm not so sure that there is a great all in one that also works as a master backup though.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:06
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1st AD posted:Dropbox is the easiest, and their api hooks into Vimeo pretty nicely.  BonoMan posted:Wistia is great. One of our big clients, Bomgar, turned us on to them and we're starting to use them more and more. Great for collaboration, white label player and analytics. But I think it transcodes everything yeah? So not so great as a backup service. EDIT: I asked Wistia about the transcoding of uploaded videos. Here's what their representative just told me: quote:Once a video is uploaded to your account, Wistia automatically transcodes versions of your video for playback (you can read more about the different derivatives that may be created here: http://wistia.com/doc/export-settings). Within the account, you'll see an option to download the original file, but the original file itself won't be loaded into the Wistia player. Wistia sounds good, but they fall short in video privacy. If you want to make videos private and only playable for specific users, you need to buy into their expensive $100/month plan. Vimeo Pro offers this in Vimeo PRO at $217 CAD per year. melon cat fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 21:25
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If you're just trying to move/backup big video files, I'd give BTSync a try. It's free, and I've successfully moved about 2TB worth of stuff over it this month.
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Dec 23, 2014 22:55
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Why is dropbox banned? That's literally the single best answer.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:24
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Probably whatever ports it's using are blocked by their firewall.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:52
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The great thing about Wistia and Wiredrive, etc is the collaborative ability. Not to just share a video, but easily mark ins and outs, timecode spots, etc so that you can make joint notes and easily reference an exact moment in time for a video (great for when we have people tag teaming HOURS of interviews for choice quotes). Does Dropbox or something else that plugs into it's API do anything like that?
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Dec 23, 2014 23:59
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Thanks for the Wistia info. So far, I like what I'm seeing with those guys! A question about After Effects CS6. I'm still learning the software, but I'm having a tough time differentiating between the 3D Camera Tracker and the 'Track Motion' feature. When is it better to use over the other? And what does one do that the other can't?
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Dec 28, 2014 23:55
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3D Tracking was a feature added into CS6, and the concept of having it dynamically scan your clip and generate tracking markers that recognized depth was pretty awesome at the Adobe Tupperware Display I attended. It's main purpose is to track stuff within a 3D composition, as it extrapolates depth and can move along the Z plane. While you can sort of do this with regular tracking, this comes with the convenience of automatically scaling whatever you have hooked up to a tracking point, saving you a fair bit of keyframing. You can also use it to ferry motion point data into a 3D software application if you need to do a match move in Maya. More info here. While it's clever, it's not that smart so if something obscures your marker or it goes off frame then it might throw a small fit trying to extrapolate your information. Good ol, regular tracking in comparison is better used for 2D compositions. Simply pick a point, and lock your object to it. It's also used for motion stabilizing and in comparison has a ton of controls and settings, plus hooks into the Mocha software for even better tools. Far more info here.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:01
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I really like the 2D motion tracking in Resolve, it seems to do a lot better with objects that move in and out of frame. 3D tracking in AE is definitely useful though if you're gonna track type or something in a shot with z-axis movement.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:06
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Monitors for a Color Correction System: Any ideas? We have a new guy starting and he wants to learn color correction. Part of his salary negotiation was that we build him a system for color correction. His recommended monitors (which he admitted was based on some very early research) was the FSI 17" monitor here: http://www.shopfsi.com/CM171-p/cm171.htm That seems awfully lot for a 17" desktop monitor. Very powerful indeed, but more suited to some mobile in the the field solution. Before he came on board I had been looking at the HP DreamColor series. Anybody have any experience with those or anything else? I can get 2 x 27" DreamColors for the price of that one 17" FSI monitor.
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Jan 2, 2015 20:31
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FSI is pretty much the standard cost effective solution for color correcting. You can also look at one of the Sony PVM series OLEDs at a similar price point.
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Jan 2, 2015 20:58
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Gunjin posted:FSI is pretty much the standard cost effective solution for color correcting. You can also look at one of the Sony PVM series OLEDs at a similar price point. Good to know, thanks!
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Jan 2, 2015 22:23
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Thanks for explaining the difference between the tracking modes! It's much more clear, to me. I've been doing a lot more video editing, and I've concluded that my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad) is horribly-inadequate for this type of work. Rendering takes forever, the tiny screen makes it difficult to properly view my Workspace windows, etc. So I'm saving up towards a much better desktop PC. But how powerful of a rig do I need for doing more intensive AE projects? I was considering something along the lines of this PC Part Picker build, but wasn't sure if it'd be the best set up.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:48
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melon cat posted:Thanks for explaining the difference between the tracking modes! It's much more clear, to me. Ditch the liquid cooler, upgrade to 32 gigs of ram (you'll need a Windows 7 pro to use 32 gigs I think?), and you can probably just have one GPU if you need to further save. Not sure how much it will gain you. And maybe look at going up to the i7?
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Jan 4, 2015 21:36
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BonoMan posted:Ditch the liquid cooler, upgrade to 32 gigs of ram (you'll need a Windows 7 pro to use 32 gigs I think?), and you can probably just have one GPU if you need to further save. Not sure how much it will gain you. And maybe look at going up to the i7? And are we ditching the liquid cooler because they aren't effective, or just for cost-considerations?
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Jan 4, 2015 23:15
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melon cat posted:Thanks for commenting on this. I agree with you on the i7, so I'll probably go with it. And I can see why 32 GB of RAM would be the bare minimum- I'm currently using 16 GB of RAM, and my rendering speed is like molasses. In my experience its just not needed. I've built a few AE machines over the past several months and the stock cooling has been plenty. We added a cooler master 212 evo for noise factors to a couple of the machines, but even that isn't technically necessary.
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Jan 4, 2015 23:51
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Custom coolers are only necessary for overclocking, which is generally considered to be a bad idea for a rendering machine. They can help with the volume though.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:24
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BonoMan posted:You'll need a Windows 7 pro to use 32 gigs I think?. Also keep an eye out on Adobe's list of recommended graphics cards as they've removed the ability to hack in unsupported graphics cards. However you can still force this via the Nvidia control panel where you go into profiles, pick After Effects / Premiere and tell it to use CUDA. However anything underpowered will poo poo the bed if you try to make it do something like ray-casting. Edit: More RAM will simply allow you to store more frames in the preview ready to be crunched and rendered. The big bottleneck is usually hard drive write speeds, which SSD drives has begun to solve. After Effects has a secret menu (activated by holding Shift when going into preferences) that allows you to force it to purge your RAM after X amount of rendered frames, which usually saves it from crashing when it runs out of memory. Before Adobe brought about disk caching (which pretty much uses your hard drive space instead of RAM) it was a constant battle to work with on low-end systems. You would usually have to export out layers of complex effects then sandwich them into a finalized file. BogDew fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 04:51
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melon cat posted:Thanks for commenting on this. I agree with you on the i7, so I'll probably go with it. And I can see why 32 GB of RAM would be the bare minimum- I'm currently using 16 GB of RAM, and my rendering speed is like molasses. I don't think the RAM helps with render time at all, a processor with a faster clock and more cores/threads is what you want. More RAM is a plus for After Effects previews, however.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:56
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My understanding is that each rendering thread will use a certain amount of RAM, so if you don't have enough to utilize every possible thread you're going to bottleneck yourself.
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Jan 5, 2015 05:42
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Yeah but I think he was specifically complaining about slow rendering with 16gb of RAM and unless he's editing 5k Red raw, I don't think the RAM was the issue. And even if he's working with Epic or Dragon footage, more CPU power is going to count for a lot more than more RAM imo.
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Jan 5, 2015 08:26
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Yeah, for sure. The RAM supports the CPU so if the latter is lacking more of the former won't do squat.
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Jan 5, 2015 08:48
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He's been editing on a laptop so CPU was most likely the biggest bottleneck.
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Jan 5, 2015 16:21
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WebDog posted:You'll need a 64bit variant of Windows 7 to use more than 4gb of RAM as well as allow After Effects to install, they don't have a 32 bit version anymore. True, and I looked it up and you def have to have Pro or above to use more than 16 gigs of RAM. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7
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Jan 5, 2015 16:22
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BonoMan posted:True, and I looked it up and you def have to have Pro or above to use more than 16 gigs of RAM. Haha, that's some bullshit right there.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:11
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bassguitarhero posted:He's been editing on a laptop so CPU was most likely the biggest bottleneck. I was just speaking in context of building a new system, which would presumably not be bottlenecked in the same way. Anyway, you definitely want an i7 and almost definitely 32gb RAM. I'm not positive that premiere/ae support multiple video cards on windows systems or how much of a benefit you'd see. I would extensively research that before dropping $800 on cards. As far as I know they still don't officially support CUDA at all with the exception of some Quadro cards and you need to manually edit a text file to enable GPU acceleration. Storage is messy. Ideally you want every read and write function to be restricted to its own drive. But depending on what you're doing you can get away with two or even just one fast drive(s). Stock cooler is fine or something like a Hyper 212+ to help with noise. Don't break the bank here. For the most part you can follow the general buying advice thread in SHSC. You'll find specific part recommendations there. edit - Monitors will depend on what you're working on. My ideal would be a giant fuckoff 4k monitor for maximum workspace and a second color-calibrated (IPS or another color accurate technology) monitor. Maybe even a third if you have need for it. Yip Yips fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 00:49
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Thanks for all of this info, guys. It's giving me a much better sense as to what my next rig needs to have. Now, here's a motion tracking question. What's the best way to set a tracking point for a moving shot? Are this motion tracking stickers the best solution? Or is there a better DIY way to make something that After Effects can easily track?
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Jan 10, 2015 04:37
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melon cat posted:Thanks for all of this info, guys. It's giving me a much better sense as to what my next rig needs to have. Really depends on the scene and its complexity. Do you know what the shot is? I track stuff all the time in AE with no markers as long as it's relatively in focus and not a super long shot.
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Jan 10, 2015 04:42
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BonoMan posted:Really depends on the scene and its complexity. Do you know what the shot is? I track stuff all the time in AE with no markers as long as it's relatively in focus and not a super long shot.
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Jan 10, 2015 05:11
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Stickers are handy for more complex situations such as a completely green screen where it helps determine the scale of something know you need to replace and comp in a background. However while you get a nice track, you then have to remove them in post. On a greenscreen, easy, but if you have markers all over a house during a busy scene you will then have to spend time rotoing out every track marker. Now with most other cases where it's a shot that needs to be fixed, but has no marker to reference, the track points are best determined by any pixels that have a high contrast. One trick is to deliberately boost the contrast up on your footage to find some points. And then depending on how visible they are, auto or manually track to fit. You can remove that contrast boost once you have the tracker data setup.
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Jan 10, 2015 05:51
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Mac Pro trip report: 12 core Mac Pro with 64gb of ram and dual 6gb D700s, editing Red Epic 5k raws from a RAID5 in FCPX - still beachballs like a motherfucker when I try to randomly access other clips, but fortunately it scrubs though clips plenty fast. Was able to play clips at 4x speed at a half res debayer without any lag. Just wish there was a cheaper way to build an SSD RAID because that probably solve some of my lag problems.
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Jan 11, 2015 08:32
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