It's strange to me that you're having to split the animations for the projectors. Isn't that what Watchout does? Maps out a single element across multiple outputs?

 

Curtis Nichols
Senior Editor
PCS Production Co.
Irving, Tx.
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From: Chris Zwar <chris@chriszwar.com>
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 7:33 PM

Subject: Re: [AE] [OT] Batch compression options

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.  For the record here's a bit more info-

-The many compressions are projector splits for a watchout job.  I've just checked and we have about 70 individual animations that will be split between either 7 or 11 projectors each.  So a revised and more accurate total is that we'll be compressing between 500 and 750 clips.

-Delivering MP4s is not an option.  This is an important, one-off launch event with an international cast.  People fly in from all over the world, do their thing once and that's it.  The watchout crew won't risk any hiccups or tech problems.  They've given us very precise compression specs and that's what we'll stick to.  Even though watchout can probably handle all sorts of stuff, for this event that's been worked on for months we just do what we're told - no-one will risk making a global CEO looking like a muppet in front of a blank or frozen screen.

-I've had a quick look at FFMPEG but I can't see if it can encode to WMV-9's pro codec (ie. VC1), which is what we compress to.  I'm happy to experiment with FFMPEG but a quick google search seems to indicate that it can only decode VC1, not encode to it.  Is this old news?  Is it something we can work around with flip4mac, or do we have to use specific encoder libraries for ffmpeg?

-Now that I've had a chance to work on the project for a bit I can see that although there are loads of compressions, it's not as painful as I first thought.  Actually it's doing the projector splits which is more tedious.  AE makes this quite painless with the ability to name outputs based on project name and comp name, so now I have set up an output template it's all pretty smooth.

So although there are still lots of clips to compress, it's actually not as painful as I thought and it's actually render output options in AE which are doing a lot of the work.

Cheers,


-Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Oakley [mailto:steveo@practicali.com]
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2013 01:56 PM
To: 'After Effects Mail List'
Subject: Re: [AE] [OT] Batch compression options

deliver MP4's which AME can do. MP4's will work native on windoze back to XP. AME can use a watch folder which would make this simple. otherwise adobe apps don't see F4M as a codec. don't say how many times its been FR'd.

the alternative may in fact be to buy an older PC and set that up

S

On Jul 21, 2013, at 7:30 PM, "Chris Zwar" <chris@chriszwar.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is a bit OT, but compression isn't normally my thing.
>
> I'm working on a project where we will be supplying roughly 1000 individual clips as wmvs.  We're all working on Macs with no Windows machines around, and rendering from After Effects to image sequences.
>
> Just wondering what the best tool is to convert / compress the image sequences to wmvs.  The main thing we want is one where we can save the render queue and selectively re-queue items as they are revised.  I guess in my mind I think of the After Effects render queue, where you can tick and un-tick items, or re-queue items to render again and so on.  The thing is that these clips will be tweaked, rendered, revised, re-rendered and so on.  So it's not just a matter of doing a batch conversion once, it's a matter of selectively revising and re-delivering over a period of weeks.  We will always be rendering the image sequences to the same "final" folder, so the source files won't be moving.
>
> We will purchase flip-4-mac licences to render to wmvs, but not really sure about what the options are to work from image sequences and being able to save a batch compression queue.  We have compressor somewhere, and can easily download MPEG streamclip.  I haven't really played around with the Adobe Media Encoder to know what it's capable of.  Not sure if I can convince them to spring for something like Squeeze, but if it's really awesome then maybe I can.
>
> It will be tedious to set up 1000 compressions so I really only want to do it once... any suggestions are welcome.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> -Chris
>
>
>
>
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