New to AE!! Lens Blur, format and hardware questions.

[USLatin]

I am being completely blown flat outta the water as I watch the little free tutorials at VideoCopilot.net I just got After Effects about three days ago and I haven't installed it yet as I am also trying to pick up Avid... lol

So... I have nothing but questions. Hopefully some of you guys can chime in and gimme a little helping hand if you have a bit of free time :D


First up... the Lens Blur effect.

What are it's downfalls/cons/difficulties?
It looks great and not having a lens adapter I am all ears for info about it (well eyes too :) ).
I am wondering if it is easy to achieve smooth real looking focus pulls... well smoothness won't be the problem, but is it easy to make the movements seem like a great 1st AC's?



Secondly... in what format should I import the footage onto AE?

I might be shooting a 720p project soon but I plan to keep shooting a lot of 1080p too. I heard that you might want to render the footage uncompressed when importing NLEs other than Premiere. I was just talking about this today with an other HVX owner and we were trying to figure out the correlation between MXF files and DVCPRO HD in that we were wondering that if each company has their own DVCPRO HD codec then when using something other than Premier you might want to go uncompressed to avoid recompression or already footage already compressed in an other way... anyway... I'll stop trying to explain my understanding and just leave it to those who know this stuff to explain it.
I edit with Vegas + Raylight and I am also in the process of learning AVID which I want to make my main NLE.


And finally... what does AE need most in terms of hardware?

Basically I am wondering if it is CPU based or if by a stoke of bad luck to me this application also needs an FX card cause it is GPU based...
I am guessing it is CPU based, like Photoshop. If so then what kind of performance is one to expect when working with 1080p on a fast new rig?

[milksac]

RE: lens blur effect. I'd do a some testing in AE before I fired the AC.

RE: system requirements. Lots of RAM. (min 4 gig.)


If so then what kind of performance is one to expect when working with 1080p on a fast new rig?
Even if you have an 8 core don't expect AE to work like a NLE, it's not a NLE. The workflow requires loading the images into RAM for previewing.

[USLatin]

RE: lens blur effect. I'd do a some testing in AE before I fired the AC.

lol no plans for that even it it rocks... I figured even if it works flawlessly I am still not
gonna want to shoot everything in full focus and have to post every shot... though it did cross my mind.

I am thinking about this to achieve depth that is unattainable with the Leica and tweak... maybe shoot a few premeditated but mostly just do your best in prod and then try to use this as yet an other tool in post


I see... so it is CPU based and like PS it hogs up the ram... I noticed my single GB in the lappy was 100% used while testing last night.... I am about to test for the first time in the PC today which has 3GB (4GB in XP)

So:
I guess you REALLY try to limit the length of the clip you import... I am going to try to replace the sky on this shot and it I can pull it off I will do the others which will be much easier... the problems: it is a 40+ second shot, the BG is mostly foliage moving in the wind, the talent swipes left to right in the frame, there is little to no head-room... I had 11 tracks parented together, lol... needless to say I completely blew it and the sky got tracked of to some other TV set that was upside down and in China, lol... this stuff is so fun though!!!!

[DecadenceFilms]

When you are using HD footage it is best to create proxies. You'll find a decent tutorial on videocopilot about them.

Essentially you use low quality video whilst creating your effects then simply transfer the settings to the higher quality settings. It makes things much faster.

[USLatin]

Oh... ok.... so a proxy... I'll look for that tutorial then. I noticed he was using 480i footage when working. Thanks

[Drew Ott]

You're wanting to rotoscope shallow depth of field?

or just add those gradient blurs like in the tutorials?

[tcindie]

I just saw a dvd available for rental at smartflix.com that covers faking shallow depth of field in AE..

[USLatin]

I would have to rotoscope unless it was sort of a flat pane on the frame...


I just saw a dvd available for rental at smartflix.com that covers faking shallow depth of field in AE..

Smartflix.com .... hummm... I should take a closer look... (I just got an AVID tutorial that I am watching now though, ma brain is gonna blow :) )
thanks for the link... I'll see if I can find it

[Demistate]

I've found that the default memory usage in AFX is too high at 120%. Change it to 80% and things go a lot faster (having to page things into and out of virtual memory is where most of the slowdown comes in)

I have 2gb of memory and work on DVCProHD resolution files.

[USLatin]

aha! wow... yea that should have a huge impact on performance... thanks a bunch for sharing that info!

[USLatin]

well I looked and it seems the driver cache is off by default

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/6586/1196653043.jpg

things to mention are that you can set the file to be used so if you had two fast drives it might be interesting to see what turning it on and setting the file to one of the fast drives would do, then using the fastest drive for the media files...

BTW... the 2.6GB recognized is a bit weird since I have 4GB... I know it only sees 2GB but with a /boot.ini edit (adding " /3GB " to the very end) you are supposed to get 3GB seen out of the 4GB... then again this is with the AVID promts /3GB fix to the /boot.ini not with the fix recommended for AE... this AVID prompt edit gives you an option to boot normal without any changes to the boot file or boot in with their /3GB edit to the boot.ini file... theirs is not just " /3GB " though... it is " /3GB /userva=2700" /3GB /userva=2700 /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /noguiboot " again weird since Windows can see up to 3.25GB so I wonder why Adobe didn't make that a possibility and only 3GB... so maybe that's why I only get 2.6GB

in this case, with 2.6GB recognized I guess I could set the RAM% to 70% and get 1.8GB used instead of only 1.6GB with the default value of 60% while still keeping the same amount of RAM free with the default settings 0.8GB...

what I should do is set up a big memory intensive project and test each one...

default
AE/s boot.ini fix
AE/s boot.ini fix with different RAM % usage
AE/s boot.ini fix with different RAM % usage and drive cache
AVID's boot.ini fix
AVID's boot.ini fix with different RAM % usage
AVID's boot.ini fix with different RAM % usage and drive cache

I bet there would be significant differences but you can only know you set it up right be running a tedious test like this one... and I am deep into figuring out what video-card to get to replace my 8800 GTS 640MB for full screen in AVID... maybe if you guys send me a donation I'll do even more tests than this and write an article.. lol :) I know.. I am just kiddin!!! but it would be the right way to do it.

Then again there HAS to be a good guide or someone who already did this... I mean AE is like freaking Word! everyone seems to have it...