ComP Start COmp_WHA?!
So after finishing up the matte paintings I started compositing final shots today... Here's some notes...
My workflow for making the matte paintings was this...
Render out a bunch of still elements from C4d to use (mountains, statues, trees etc)
Export a still from a shot/set that needs a matte painting...
Bring that into Photoshop with the other elements visible in Bridge so I can easily grab stuff and use it in Pshop...
Create the matte painting through mega photoshopping...
Open a shot in After Effects
Import the Pshop file for the MPainting as a Compostion so the layers are intact in AE
Drop the matte painting into the bg of the Ae compostion
Turn it into a 3d layer, add an expression to the Position and use the pick whip to make it a child of the "Sky tracker" lights that came in from C4d
Rotate and scale it into position, levels adjustment
Add anything else to the Mpainting composition do necessary adjustments
I created my matte paintings at 2500 x 2000 pixels.... and by having them as active compositions in my AE compostions makes things really slow.... after doing some render tests I found that on my i7 box with 16gb of ram my comps are too heavy for it too render without errors and artifacts... Its mainly the Matte painting BG comps that are causing the probs because I added animated elements into them as well and yeh they are 2500x2000 0_o and of course I've got a good number of fx as well on multiple adjustment layers...
Sooooo... the solution is to render the matte painting comps out at image sequences...BUT I don't want to do that before doing the FINAL comps because I'll have to modify them from shot to shot most likely... SO what I'm going to do is.... Start doing final composites BUT not render them yet as they still have the matte painting MEGA compositions in them... SO when the finals are ready and the bg's are all tweaked to death THEN I'll render each bg out as an image sequence switch that out with the Compostion using AE's "render and replace" output module option... SO then once the rendered bg's are in place I'll be able to render the final comps...
After Effects Cs5 really eats ram with heavy comps... mY i7 box has 4 cores(8 w/ht) and 16gb of ram BUT on anything but the lightest comps I have to set the multiprocessing options to only use 3 cores with 3gb for each core... I did a bunch of speed tests and on my 920 machine there wasn't much of a speed difference between using 3 cores or 6 cores in AE on a light compostion... NOW its more about how much ram a core has when the compositions get heavier... for example... After Effects will render a heavy comp using 6 cores with only like 1.5gb per core but it will take FOREVER 0_o then you switch it to 3 cores with 3gb each and it chugs along nonstop and gets done like 5x faster than using 6 starved for ram cores...
Even with 3gb per core rendering my comps with the active 2500x2000 bg's were too much so I will have to pre-render those... but its not a problem at all...
On a totally different subject...
A pretty well know film sales agent contacted me today cause he "heard good things" about my new film and was inquiring about it... And I'm like 0_o cause there's like no info or anything about it anywhere... I guess those d00ds like to get a head start or something ^ ^
From my lil experience with that side of the business... unless you sell it for like 2 million + and get a guaranteed international theatrical run its not really worth it to go through a sales agent to get a DVD/VOD deal... we can do good DVD/Vod deals ourselves and end up making a lot more money then if we went through a middle man... I could have made 4x as much money as I did if I would have fully exploited WATS but I was like eh I made enough to make a new film... I'm gonna go do that...
So unless a distributor offers me a couple million bucks for it I'll be doing things on my own again with help from my friends out there ^ ^ I'm really looking forward to working with Indieblitz! This time I'm gonna do my best to make available all the merchandise that yall told me you wanted in the survey I conducted... TOYS would be the ultimate but I haven't investigated that too much yet...aight well back to work...Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.