How to do longer ram preview ?

[Redcritimo]

Hi,

I have a 30mn long video with a proxy ! just like this :

And I simply wanna have my full comp to be green, But when I do a RAM preview the green bar seems to stop at some point and whenever i make it start again,

the beginning of the green parts go away, I tried to increase the disk cache size, but that does not seem to be working :s

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

AE is for working on shots not movies. Typical comp length for most projects that involve moving images made with a camera is usually ten seconds or less. Most AE comps do not involve more than on shot because AE is for compositing and motion graphics, not for editing. It is the wrong tool.

You don't gain anything in your production process by previewing at 60fps or full resolution if the Comp Panel has a magnification factor of less than 100%. In most cases you'll get a more cinematic look if you produce your film at 24 or even 30 fps. To see what the comp looks like, especially at 60 fps you can set the preview panel to skip 1 or even 2 frames. You should also have your comp panel resolution set to auto and have the magnification set to 25 or 50%.

There are no systems that I know of that would fit in a desktop machine that will preview 30 minutes of HD footage at 59.94 fps using any compositing or motion graphics app. It's just not possible because of the way compositing apps work. I don't know what you are planning to do with the Cars Main Footage but the best workflow would be to trim that footage to just the frames that are going to be used in the final production, then do your AE work. If the work you are going to do on the footage cannot be done in a non linear editor, and you have to process all 30 minutes of footage then I would still break the shot down into comps that are about a minute long and then stitch the project back together in a NLE.

I also don't know why you are using a proxy. Rendering an H.264 proxy will KILL your effects processing speed because the CPU will have to decode the footage, figure out what pixels go in the imaginary in between frames you get with MPEG compression, amplify compression artifacts and noise, and give you a final product that is significantly lower in quality than the original. It takes about 1/4 the time to decode lossless formats. Image sequences decode even faster. The standard use of a Proxy is so you can preview motion and timing at a lower resolution and get the "pencil test" portion of your project done in less time. A pencil test is where you preview animation without all of the effects turned on so you can adjust the timing. The term comes from cell animations that used simple sketches to lay block out their shots before ink and paint finished the shots. Once you have the timing and animation working you the original footage is brought back into the project for final visual checks and rendering. I can think of no possible other use for a proxy. From what I gather about your workflow you have set up a loose loose proposition.

I hope these suggestions help. It would do you good to study industry standard workflows and figure out what will serve you best. Just poking around in the app and inventing your own workflow because you heard somebody say something or watched some YouTube tutorial by an amateur is usually a huge waste of time.

[Redcritimo]

Hey thank you very much for all of these informations.

Especially for answering more or less my question saying this :

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Rick+Gerard  escribió

There are no systems that I know of that would fit in a desktop machine that will preview 30 minutes of HD footage at 59.94 fps using any compositing or motion graphics app. It's just not possible because of the way compositing apps work. I don't know what you are planning to do with the Cars Main Footage but the best workflow would be to trim that footage to just the frames that are going to be used in the final production, then do your AE work. If the work you are going to do on the footage cannot be done in a non linear editor, and you have to process all 30 minutes of footage then I would still break the shot down into comps that are about a minute long and then stitch the project back together in a NLE.

What I want to do is to masks out all taxis from a car scene and put them back together just like this :

Rick Gerard

Just poking around in the app and inventing your own workflow because you heard somebody say something or watched some YouTube tutorial by an amateur is usually a huge waste of time.

This is exactly, I am not following any specific tutorial ha, I am not entirely new to AE honestly haha

Thank you for explaining me about the proxy, the truth is that I had this proxy already done for PP, so I thought why not using it in After Effects, it might accelerate the rendering.

I had a my preview button at 60 fps because I was just trying to preview the 30 minutes faster.

Anyway, yes I am gonna give it a try and try using PP and sending the comps to AE

[Rick Gerard]

A proxy won't do you any good in Premiere Pro either. The best quality comes from camera original. If you have to render a digital intermediate, and most consumer cameras will benefit from that if you are doing a lot of processing, then you pick a Mezanine codec (look it up) that is visually lossless, renders and decodes quickly, and is compatible with your system. 10 bit or better is what I use for almost all of my DI's. Footage that is going to be heavily processed and may go through several generations is almost always rendered to a 32bit TIFF or TGA (depending on the client) image sequence. Sometimes I use Jpeg 2000 image sequences because that format supports alpha channels and is visually lossless with very reasonable file sizes.

It's important to remember that you loose quality every time you re-compress a movie by making a compressed version from an already compressed version. Do that 3 or 4 times and the detail will start to disappear from your footage and colors will start to mush together. Do it 5 or 6 times and the footage will start to look pretty awful.

[P.M.B]

Why is every car white?  I found that extremely distracting.

[Redcritimo]

Thats because they have been all masked out and put back together

Same thing I am doing with taxis

[Redcritimo]

Ingest proxies in PP allows to edit seamlessly they help me, they are very useful, and PP renders using the camera original file obivously so I really don't see the problem

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi redcritimo,

Sorry for this issue. Did you ever find a solution? Please let us know if our experts’ advice helped you or if you still need help.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Redcritimo]

Not really, but I understood that AE could technicaly not Ram preview 30mn of footage.