Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Thoughts on After Effects?

Shawn Nelson

Shawn Nelson

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2006
Messages
4,595
Reaction score
1
Points
0
Age
42
Location
Portland, OR
Its been years since I've used After Effects and I am considering diving back in for the purpose of Red.

How does it handle Red? I guess I can be more specific, how does it handle a 2k or 4k DPX sequence? My first priority would probably be color correcting with Colorista. After that I am interested in compositing and green screen work as well as occasionally rotoscoping.

My other option is to dive into Apple Motion instead, or to wait until something else .

FYI, my main NLE is FCP. My primary interest in AE is to get the FCP->Crimson->RedCine->After Effects workflow. Then in AE to do both color correcting and easy fx.

Thoughts?

Mods: I put this thread intentionally outside the Adobe section so that non-Adobe people could have the chance to see it and talk me out of it, should it be necessary.
 
Sean, what kind of projects will you be doing in After Effects? Shorts, commercials, features? It can make a big difference in terms of workflow. Colorista is very good and obviously the 16bit or float capability of AE is nice for maintaining clean CC and FX. But it's not real-time and with clients in the room can be a challenge. I currently have been working on a FCP>After Effects online process that utilizes Automatic Duck, but I've had some issues with color space with certain codecs, so still experimenting. But it's very slow with clients in the room.

Should be able to work with 2K fine, 4K I haven't tried.
 
Hey Shawn

Great questions.
I'm not sure which NLE I’ll use but I know AE7 will be on the computer for many of the reasons you mentioned. Keylight is great for Green screen. I am hoping Colorista or Color Finesse will handle color correction.
Slow but capable.
I wish I had the answers you’re looking for, but my camera is still a month away.
I will be following the post with interest. Best of luck.

Frank
 
Beyond the software tools you choose, don't forget that you will probably want to consider a RAID0 (or better yet, RAID5) disc array with AT LEAST 8 to 10 drives if you are expecting anything near good interactivity working with multilayer 4K comps.

Working with the RED footage on a stock MAC pro is great and easily done.

But with 10bit 4K uncompressed frames @ between 28MB to 35MB each, effective, extended compositing (in any application) at this resolution simply can't be done using only a few drives.

Happy Pixel Polishing!
 
After Effects, fast computer, fast drives, and perhaps something like Nucleo from Gridiron and you start to have a pretty nice 1080P uncompressed online system. Stu Maschwitz covers some of this ground in his DV Rebel's Guide, a good read by the way. As long as you can deal with some of the compromises in terms of speed, you actually have quite a few tools at your disposal.

What are your deliverables? The nice thing is you can create a pristine master in After Effects (image sequence) and strike digital dubs from that (tape output, DVD, web, etc).
 
Not so much the speed of the system I don't think, but the way in which the work is done in AE isn't really suited to client-attended work. I know I hate doing AE work with clients sitting behind me.

But AE is a fantastic application. I dunno if I'd wanna tackle an online in it (not really suited for that sort of thing) and even our gruntiest computers tend to choke a little on heavy 1080 compositions, I imagine 4K would be somewhat painful - but haven't tried yet. We'll be doing some 2K comping soon.
 
Thanks guys! I won't have clients in the room, so the lack of real time isn't an issue.

I'm strongly leaning towards buying this soon. But as I posted in another thread, I am slightly worried about buying CS3 a few weeks before NAB. They aren't about to drop CS4 are they?
 
The very first images we got off of Franky ( Watch shot, porsche. etc) I all cut together using AE.. it was the only app we had that could handle the resolution at that time. Scratch came along and made things alot easier, but AE saved the day way back then.

Still, almost everything I shoot on RED still hits AE.
 
The single greatest thing about Red footage in AE: Quarter Resolution looks amazing!

Never in my life have I had the pleasure of so many pixels.
 
Ae Rox!

Ae Rox!

Ninety-Nine said:
The single greatest thing about Red footage in AE: Quarter Resolution looks amazing!

Never in my life have I had the pleasure of so many pixels.
Click to expand...

I hear you Ninety-Nine...

AE is such an awesome app. It takes some time and patience to really understand it but it is such a great app for doing pretty much any motion related project. The workflows you can create with nested comps can at times boggle the mind. If you pre-think your projects it is amazing at how easy you can make your life when those inevitable last minute "changes" crop up.

I've used this app ALOT for about 13 years - back when Macs were still pretty clunky. Last night I completed a fairly major project at work on a very new 8 core Mac desktop and I've got to say I found the speed of AE renders was close to jaw-dropping (I shit you not!!). This app has evolved beautifully over the years - thats why I continue to use it. People used to say I was crazy for using AE more or less as an NLE - that was back when I couldn't afford AVID or Media100 time and there was no FCP. I plan on AE being a fairly major part of my RED workflow. So what if I cant do a 4K full res preview? I've worked around not being able to do full res SD previews before! This isn't actually all that much different. The only real difference between then and now is the resolution and the computing grunt you throw at it. Both have grown exponentially! (thankfully)

Cam
 
I cannot imagine using AE as a finishing program when two things are likely to happen:

1. Reconform, happens often unfortunately and can be a big challenge.

2. Tight timing.

Otherwise AE has its obvious strenghts (moving graphics for instance) and yes, native RAW support will be great - in any compositor.

Hans
 
I see there are two distinctive groups of people using RED camera, correct me if I am wrong.

Post houses and big budget project guys is the first group and small shops and Indies is the second group.
Post houses can’t effort transcoding and all apps have to conform to EDL.
Original REDRAW is kept in its original format all the way till the time the final data for prints have to be created.

Transcoding needs time and may lower the quality, though transcoding REDRAW to 16 bit tif is waste of your time but as quality is concern, it gives you choice of editing software out there that can process tifs much better than the software that supports REDRAW natively, so if anything, you can get much better results because of transcoding in such a cases.

BTW if CS4 will come out during the NAB then Adobe has always upgrade path for couple of hundred dollars.
 
Sycophant said:
Not so much the speed of the system I don't think, but the way in which the work is done in AE isn't really suited to client-attended work. I know I hate doing AE work with clients sitting behind me.

But AE is a fantastic application. I dunno if I'd wanna tackle an online in it (not really suited for that sort of thing) and even our gruntiest computers tend to choke a little on heavy 1080 compositions, I imagine 4K would be somewhat painful - but haven't tried yet. We'll be doing some 2K comping soon.
Click to expand...

I meant speed in terms of preview time. I use Automatic Duck to bring my FCP timeline into AE and it creates a new layer for every clip. With a bunch of edits, this can get cumbersome pretty quickly. On my machine (G5 Quad) it can get bogged down. With clients in the room, they tend to want to see results quickly. "Oh, we can't see that change instantly. Nope, we have to render a preview. Oh, okay let me go make some calls". Same goes for FCP if you are using Colorista or other non-realtime effects. But true online systems have a lot of realtime power. They also can't do some of the amazing things you can do in AE either. So, there's always tradeoffs.
 
Shawn Nelson said:
I am slightly worried about buying CS3 a few weeks before NAB. They aren't about to drop CS4 are they?
Click to expand...

Shawn, check Amazon from time-to-time. They had CS3 for sale as a pre-order about a month or two before it released.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top