After FX and real time

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

Easy question: Is there a way to preview in real time anything in 1080 or 2k without using the RAM preview that needs rendering and can only store a few seconds?

[RivaiC]

Short Answer : No

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

Ergo it is useless as a grading solution.

[RivaiC]

AE has all functionality /tools for grading and mastering. Nucleo 2 Pro is your best bet for faster respond.

If you're looking for realtime grading. Then forget AE. It's not meant for that.

[Simon Blackledge]

Ergo it is useless as a grading solution.

Depends.. I graded a promo 1080 25p 10bit uncompressed in fcp last week using MB Looks because wasn't convinced Color would send everything back intact.

No real time preview till I rendered it..

Pain? yes.. I still managed to grade.. it just to more time. Bearing in mind it wasn't a simple 3way etc..which is quick. There were about 9 nodes per grade. The frustrating part of looks is there is no still store.

Agree you can't beat interactivity though.. that's why were seriously looking at Scratch.

s

[RivaiC]

IMO, avoid serious work with Color for now. We haven't been able to output back to FCP properly for couple of sequences. And it's less than 20 minutes, it just crash when sent back.

[Simon Blackledge]

you need to revert to V1 to export xml .. busted in current .1 version

s

[Bruce Allen]

AE is very tiresome as a grading solution, but for short projects the results can be excellent. Many of the intro sequences you see on TV had most of the creative grading work done in AE. Same with a bunch of commercials and music vids.

Agreed - AE needs the option to render previews to a compressed disk format, which it can play back directly from, a la an editing program (no tedious caching into RAM process).

For grading, the interface becomes cumbersome for longer projects, incorporating changes, etc. But hey, I use it all the time!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Sean]

What's wrong with grading with proxies, allowing something closer to real-time preview, and then tweak with the 1080p footage on a "frame" basis?

[Mike McCarthy]

Just to offer a theoretical, my system can process many effects in AE in real time for standard definition. The only limit to AE's performance is processing speed. Granted, they don't have the most efficient code for real-time performance, looking instead for flexability. Given a fast enough system, many effects should be able to be realtime. Tremendous disk speed will be a big factor, as well as CPU power obviously. I am not saying that it CAN be done yet, but I wouldn't discount the possibility so quickly. I would venture to guess that an overclocked pair of Quad Core Xeons with a Quadro 5600 might be able to run 1080p24 thru one of the more optimized plugins like Colorista in realtime, but you would also need fast disks for AE's native uncompressed internal files. (16bit/channel etc.)
Just presenting a possibility for contemplation, not a recommendation or endorsement. I don't think we are too far away from hardware that AE could provide realtime HD with, but a few software adjustments would go a long way. I know that is not quite the way AE is designed to work.

[Greg M]

We have 8 core systems w/ internal Raids and although they are very very fast...its far from real time.

[RivaiC]

digitalfx, which QT codec that you're using ?

[Greg M]

we work uncompressed

[Mike McCarthy]

Are you using the default color tools in AE, or Color Finesse, or Colorista, or something else?

[Simon Blackledge]

Colorista and Looks is dependant on what kind of nodes you use.. just a simple exposure and 3 way is quite quick.. but not real time. You always need to render.

Thats with uncompressed 1080 from a raid with 500MBs on a top line macpro.

s

[Mike McCarthy]

Yeah I haven't used Looks yet, I saw a demo about a year ago, but it has probably changed a lot since then The original Colorista was simple, and could probably be done in realtime with current GPU power. I know Color Finesse is no where close. We use Speedgrade, so CCR in AE is not something I have had to deal with in a while. I realise those programs are realtime because they are coded in a totally different way, and optimized for GPU shader processing.

[RivaiC]

AE has a lot of power and function to do a lot of stuff, a lot of things that i like from AE.

It's only accelerator card that is missing so far ! It just doesn't seem to be supported at all. Anyway, the way AE built is different.

[Simon Blackledge]

What impressed me was I had 3 layers that were pretty slow to update in 1080.. all Looks applied then nested....then plus 3 layers of gfx.. > nested.. then 3 more plugins applied.. all with motion blur set to 25 samples..

the actual render times in AE8 were pretty bleedin quick.. seems to be slow.. but the more you hurl at it.. just seems to chew it up real quick.

[RivaiC]

What i experience, AE is slower in Mac rather than in PC. We're having QuadCore Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM and it's running slower as compare to the normal PC Dualcore 2.4 Ghz 4GB RAM.

[Mike McCarthy]

Yeah, thats cuz PCs are faster, right? :tongue:

[RivaiC]

Yeah, thats cuz PCs are faster, right? :tongue:

and cheaper. Where's Steve ? :blink: