This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.

No, it’s not from Gridiron, and it doesn’t do any of the cool preview rendering, but BG Renderer, from the AE Enhancers forum, does do background rendering, for free!

Using the power of After Effects scripting, it opens a terminal or command line window to background render any queued items.

It also had the added advanced feature to launch more than 1 instance at a time. If you have a multi-processor machine, you can launch as many instances as you have cpu’s. In my testing, this cut render times in half on a Quad G5 using 4 intances. (having at least 1 GB of ram per instance launched is recommended).

There’s lots of error checking behind the scenes so I did some beta testing to make sure it doesn’t have any bugs, but as always please share anything (good or bad) that you encounter.

Previously mentioned After Effects turbocharger Gridiron Nucleo Pro has been discounted from $495 to $395. Still a little steep for the indie, but considerably less a little steep, which is nice.

General Specialist not only has an excellent name, but Jonas is supporting that name with excellent original content.

The latest: “how to avoid the dreaded image buffer error“, with background on why it occurs, and a collection of tweaks and techniques for preventing this from happening.

Unlike many other compositing and 3D programs, After Effects doesn’t use a scanline renderer. Instead it renders each layer and then stacks it on top of the previously rendered layers. While this gives great performance for layers that can be cached and use several times without re-rendering, it can spell disaster when you are trying to work with bigger sources and output resolutions.

While you can use Shake to zoom in on a giant 30.000 by 30.000 pixel image on an old machine, doing the same thing in After Effects takes a bit of imagination, plus a knowledge of how to tweak AE’s memory settings. Basically, it comes down to the memory being to fragmented for AE to be able to hold the entire frame/layer in one contiguous piece of RAM. Here’s how you avoid that from happening.

Nucleo is a plugin which speeds After Effects performance by using multiple processors or processor downtime to for preview and background rendering. From the Features:

Fast (Nucleo) Render
Supports rendering out to both sequences and movies in any format supported by After Effects.

Fast (Nucleo) Preview Emulation
Allows you to specify which type preview you would like Nucleo to emulate, Standard (spacebar) Preview, RAM Preview, or Shift RAM Preview.

Spec-Preview
As you create your composition Nucleo automatically and continuously renders it and fills in your AE RAM Cache. When you make a change Nucleo detects it and regenerates the frames.

Spec-Render
As you create your composition Nucleo automatically and continuously renders it in the final output format. When you make a change, Nucleo detects it and regenerates the appropriate files.

Background Render Queue
When you render using Nucleo’s background render queue, you can continue to work in After Effects, or any other application. Load the background render queue up with compositions from several different projects and Nucleo will let know when they have completed.

Commit To Disk
If you have layers in your timeline that are complete but are costing you time when previewing, Nucleo allows you to commit those layers to disk. Simply select the layers and have Nucleo render only those layers out in the background. When the render is complete, the selected layers in your composition are non-destructively replaced with the rendered footage item.

CreativeCow’s Aharon Rabinowitz has posted a video review, outlining some techniques and a couple of his issues with the system. Anything which can speed your workflow and reduce rendering downtime is fantastic. $495 is a little hefty for the independant VJ, but if you’re doing freelance post or video production the time it saves may be worth the dollars.