After Effects CS5

K

kyleb

Well-known member
i'm playing with the 30 day trial of AE and was wondering do i really need this. i currently have vegas pro 9 and video essentials 1,2,3. i've seen a lot of neat tricks with AE but most are doable with Vegas Pro.

question: what's the ease of moving between programs ? as in importing .wmv files into AE. or should i use another format to import into AE ?
question: what is my workflow ? AE-Vegas or Vegas-AE ?
question: does AE support p2 media natively ?
 
You wouldn't import a delivery codec like a wmv into after effects (well, at least you shouldn't do that).

As for your workflow, that's up to you. I prefer my final output to come to my NLE. So, I'll build elements in AE and then place them in my FCP timeline.

Yes, AE supports P2 natively.

After Effects is loads more powerful than a standard NLE. It just does things you can't do with your editor.
 
is it normal for my playback to play so slow ? and i don't hear any audio on the preview screen. wow, this is gonna be a real learning curve...
 
AE is a system sucker. I spent more than $2000 just to get a nice working system.
You need a good PSU, Corsair or Seasonic. Mine is Corsair 1000W
You need a lot of DDR3 memory you can afford. Mine is 16GB, i need to add more.
You need high end video card. Mine is GTX 470
You need to have multiple cores running. Core i7 @ 4.2 Ghz
You need SSD HardDrive. Intel X25 G2
Goes on and on.

Premiere flies but AE is the bottleneck. AE is so freaking slow, added color correction,
blur and some other effects and it's crawling. AE can do really amazing effects so I don't want
to throw it out. I guess AE is not using Cuda Engine like Premiere, not for now.

Vegas 10 will be supporting cuda so that is good. No need to buy new video card. :)
 
cam123 said:
Premiere flies but AE is the bottleneck. AE is so freaking slow, added color correction,
blur and some other effects and it's crawling. AE can do really amazing effects so I don't want
to throw it out. I guess AE is not using Cuda Engine like Premiere, not for now.
Click to expand...

That's because AE has an entirely different purpose than Premiere with pretty much an entirely different workflow.

Of course you're right that system hardware will affect AE's performance, but there are a lot of ways to use AE efficiently on lesser systems.
 
What are those? I'd like to know. Please share.
I tried converting my avchd to neoscene avi and it seemed to help.
 
AE doesn't work like an NLE program like Premiere. Two totally different pieces of software with two totally different purposes. In short, it's not designed for real-time playback at all. If you want the power of AE (effects, color correction, rotoscoping, motion tracking, etc) in real-time you're going to have to step up to a Flame system. That'll only set you back around $150K or so. I guess you could get buy just with a Smoke system, but that's $15K for the software plus another $15K in hardware.

So, with that out of the way, everything in AE is based on RAM playback. Otherwise known as RAM preview. The shortcut to start the RAM preview is the 0 key on your keypad (not the 0 key about the letters). What After Effects does then it processes each frame and stores it into your RAM. When the RAM fills up or it reaches the comp/preview range end, it plays back in real-time, from the RAM.

If you go into the preferences you can enable the “Show Rendering Progress in Info Panel & Flowchart” option under the Display section. If you go to the Window menu and select the Info option, Command + 2, it will bring up the Info palette which you'll be able to see what AE is doing as you're RAM previewing.

Now, onto to how to speed this up. For starters, the more RAM you have the better. I have 18 GB on my computer at work and CS5 can now access a lot more, as well as through multiprocessing. That's a different story, but the general idea is the more RAM the better. At least 4-8GB, preferable more if you can. Having a fast processor helps too because AE only uses the CPU when processing all the effects, layers, etc. It doesn't use the GPU. Hence CUDA and all that doesn't help.

Processor and RAM will only take you so far, for some people maybe far enough. The more complex or heavy things get you'll have to start taking other measures. First off, never work in AE at full resolution. I usually work at half resolution, dropping down to quarter resolution for crazy comps. You can check your work at full resolution, but I wouldn't work in it since things get bogged down a bit. Other things you can do is to optimize your comps, keep certain effects off until you render, etc. This one is more intuition and experience so you'll learn over time. Understanding render order helps a lot, look it up in the manual.

There's plenty on this topic on this forum and the interwebs in general, so I would recommend searching a bit and doing some more research. Saying things like AE is a bottleneck and it's so slow is a bit shortsighted.
 
Thanks oneinfiniteloop. It all makes sense.
Pretty new with after effects so I'm thinking with all the hardware I have it will fly.
I was wrong. I thought it was the same NLE as vegas or premiere and by upgrading
hardware everything will be smooth.

I'll take note of all the inputs you gave and adjust my workflow. Thanks again.
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/member.php?u=10829
 
yes great explanation. i just got AE full now so i'm ready to go. i need to read more tutorials.
 
kyleb said:
i'm playing with the 30 day trial of AE and was wondering do i really need this. i currently have vegas pro 9 and video essentials 1,2,3. i've seen a lot of neat tricks with AE but most are doable with Vegas Pro.
Click to expand...

I am a recent AE adopter & Vegas user too. I also had the same question.

I think Vegas is damn good at a lot of things. The only thing I can think of using AE for is for hardcore animation. Things using the particle generators, or 3D moves etc..
I plan on using it more sparingly then I originally thought I would.

AE is a PITA to use with audio, too... in case you havent noticed.
 
cam123 said:
AE is a system sucker. I spent more than $2000 just to get a nice working system.
You need a good PSU, Corsair or Seasonic. Mine is Corsair 1000W
You need a lot of DDR3 memory you can afford. Mine is 16GB, i need to add more.
You need high end video card. Mine is GTX 470
You need to have multiple cores running. Core i7 @ 4.2 Ghz
You need SSD HardDrive. Intel X25 G2
Goes on and on.

Premiere flies but AE is the bottleneck. AE is so freaking slow, added color correction,
blur and some other effects and it's crawling. AE can do really amazing effects so I don't want
to throw it out. I guess AE is not using Cuda Engine like Premiere, not for now.

Vegas 10 will be supporting cuda so that is good. No need to buy new video card. :)
Click to expand...


Good thing I didn't know this was the basic requirement when I started using AE on an HP laptop, then migrated over to an iBook...

What I hate, is people who demand that software developers take away coffee break time with their software... no wonder modern productions look so 'frentic'... the people making the content have had no time for coffee during renders to 'rethink' their efforts...

(Oh, yeah, audio in AE is suckky... but then it wasn't intended to be a DAW or even an NLE's idea of a DAW...)
 
all i want to do in AE is titles, mostly the 3d type. then import it back to Vegas as a lead in for my video. it's pretty cool. since i already have newbluefx video essentials i, ii, iii and video copilot effects, i'm pretty set on effects. now i just need to put it al together.
 
cam123 said:
AE is a system sucker. I spent more than $2000 just to get a nice working system.
You need a good PSU, Corsair or Seasonic. Mine is Corsair 1000W
You need a lot of DDR3 memory you can afford. Mine is 16GB, i need to add more.
You need high end video card. Mine is GTX 470
You need to have multiple cores running. Core i7 @ 4.2 Ghz
You need SSD HardDrive. Intel X25 G2
Goes on and on.

Premiere flies but AE is the bottleneck. AE is so freaking slow, added color correction,
blur and some other effects and it's crawling. AE can do really amazing effects so I don't want
to throw it out. I guess AE is not using Cuda Engine like Premiere, not for now.

Vegas 10 will be supporting cuda so that is good. No need to buy new video card. :)
Click to expand...

Well... if you say so.
We have a QuadCore AMD, a 650 W Thermaltake PSU, 8 GB Of DDR3 RAM, a Fermi GTX 470 NVidia.
2 X 1 TB, Raid 0, Hard discs. 2 X 23" samsumg full HD Monitors. All cost about $1.650.000
We are working on 2k files and it runs normally, same as our older system with HD files.
 
Vegas, Premiere and Final Cut are all NLE's. Their main job is to edit. While they do share some of the same functionalities as AE, they really are very different programs.

3d space, motion graphics FX. If you use the above NLE's to do this your work will look like you did it in the 90's.
 
Yes, it is true that if you are going to just simply use the NLE as a fancy Moviola cutting system... No need for AE... If on the other hand, you are going to be compositing, keying, masking, match moving, tracking, etc... AE is the program...
 
After Effects is "visual compositing" software. Are seriously comparing an NLE to a visual compositing program? NLEs can do great things if you push them and use them in ways other than their intended use but if you want more abstract animation and 3D controls then AE, Nuke, Flame and other visual compositing softwares are the place to go. I've been using AE, Premiere, FCP for 2 years now and I'm still learning new ways to push the programs beyond their intended use. I think the question you should ask is how far does your imagination stretch? Once you know that, then I believe you will have your answer. If you want any links to some great After Effects tutorial, send me message.
 
A tip for audio in AE - if you have to time certain effects to audio events, make a comp movie in your NLE - you can add countdowns, or just have text or a color block appear - anything to give you a graphic idea of where the sound in question is. Render that out as a short clip and bring it into AE to use as a guide.
 
Michael Carter said:
A tip for audio in AE - if you have to time certain effects to audio events, make a comp movie in your NLE - you can add countdowns, or just have text or a color block appear - anything to give you a graphic idea of where the sound in question is. Render that out as a short clip and bring it into AE to use as a guide.
Click to expand...

Or you could just set markers.
 
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