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Michael Sanora
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Pre Compositions and Disappearing Objects

Jul 30, 2012 10:40 AM

Hello all. This is a tricky problem to explain. I'll try my best to articulate what's happening.

 

This project involves two stages of pre-comps before being loaded into the master comp. The steps are as follows.

 

Pre comp 1: A basic animation

 

Pre comp 2: Time Remapping

 

Master comp: Run for the duration of Pre comp 2

 

In one of my set ups, I have a .png image of a stack of up-right books (sketched and exported from Illustrator). Pre comp 1 contains an animation of the books falling over. It's one second in duration. I then load Pre comp 1 (1 second in length) into Pre comp 2 (5 seconds). Using Time Remap, I hold the inital frame of Precomp 1 for 2 seconds, let the animation play for it's normal length of time (1 second), and then hold the last frame for the remaining 2 seconds. Nothing tricky is done with the Time Remap (no expressions and no loops). I loaded Pre comp 2 into the Master comp. In the Master comp, I have Pre comp 2 positioned off screen. It moves into sight right as the books fall over and holds for two more seconds before I have it's opacity setting set to 0%. Everything worked great when I did the initial set up.

Here is the problem: On a different day, I reloaded my project and wanted to make some changes. I noticed that my Pre comp 2 was disappearing prematurely (i.e. before its opacity begins to decline from 100%). I checked Pre comp 2 thinking that my time remapping was incorrect. It turns out it worked just fine except that it would also disappear after about 3 seconds. There are no opacity setting changes in Pre comp 2, so I moved to Pre comp 1. In Precomp1, everything disappears prematurely at exactly the same time. I don't see any settings that are making these objects disappear. I've even checked my layer positioning to make sure everything was in order and it was.

 

I found that if I changed the opacity of the first layer in Pre comp 1 from 100% to 99% everything works correctly. I don't understand why this would fix the problem and don't understand what happened to cause it. Any ideas?

 

Thank you for whatever input you can offer.

 

Mike

713 Views   8 Replies   Latest reply: Michael Sanora, Aug 1, 2012 10:10 AM
 
Replies
  • Rick Gerard
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    1. Rick Gerard,
    Jul 30, 2012 11:29 AM   in reply to Michael Sanora
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    Is this in CS6? I'm thinking it may be a cache issue. Try purging all cache and emptying the disk cash if you have one.

     
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  • Michael Sanora
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    2. Michael Sanora,
    Jul 30, 2012 12:39 PM   in reply to Rick Gerard
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    Yes, It's in CS6. I turned the opacity in Pre comp 1 back to 100% from 99% to see what would happen. I purged all memory cache and found that my Pre comp 1 worked just fine, but then the Master Comp had disappearing issues. I emptied the disk cache and all the problems came right back. Changing it back to 99% fixes all the problems

     
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  • Rick Gerard
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    3. Rick Gerard,
    Jul 30, 2012 2:15 PM   in reply to Michael Sanora
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    I'd love to see the project even without footage. The behavior should be the same.

     

    Please file a bug on this if it's repeatable in another composition.

     
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  • Michael Sanora
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    4. Michael Sanora,
    Jul 31, 2012 12:19 PM   in reply to Rick Gerard
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    I would be more than happy to send you the proj file, but the more I toy around with it the more I believe it is the cache, even though your initial solution didn't quite fix it. As I got closer to finishing the project, more and more little bugs like this began to occur (maybe about 2 or 3 times in the past 4 hours or so?) and a cache clean up fixes them. A new problem emerged where I cannot render the master comp past 20 secs and 15 frames. I checked the easy things (checked work space, made sure I'm using the right commands, etc.) but still no progress. I can shrink my work space down to the area that's not rendering and it will render just fine, but then the memory clears up in other portions of the comp (the little green bar almost completely disappears with the exception of a few blue spots). It could just be my system too.

     

    If you would still like to see the project file, I can send it to you via email. And yes, once I'm 100% completed, I'll file a bug report

     
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  • Michael Sanora
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    5. Michael Sanora,
    Jul 31, 2012 12:24 PM   in reply to Michael Sanora
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    Update on the rendering issue. I increased the amount of ram all my adobe products can use from 6 GBs to 6.5 and the amount being rendered increased by a few seconds. Sounds like it could be a system problem

     
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  • Michael Sanora
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    6. Michael Sanora,
    Jul 31, 2012 12:43 PM   in reply to Michael Sanora
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    Again another update: That opacity 99% trick no longer works. I have to change it to 98%

     
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  • Dave LaRonde
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    7. Dave LaRonde,
    Jul 31, 2012 1:08 PM   in reply to Michael Sanora
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    I don't recall that you mentioned the amount of memory on your machine.  If it's in the 8 gig neighborhood, turn off multiprocessing in AE and give it a shot.

     
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  • Michael Sanora
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    8. Michael Sanora,
    Aug 1, 2012 10:10 AM   in reply to Dave LaRonde
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    Sorry for not mentioning it. Yes, it has 8 gigs. I checked to see if multiframe processing turned on but it wasn't.

     

    Here is a quick summary of current issues: I still cannot render the master comp past 20-ish seconds and parts of my pre comp still disappear when its opacity is at 100%.

     
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