BG Renderer for After Effects

This is really cool.

BG Renderer is an Adobe After Effects script by Lloyd Alvarez that allows you to keep working while your renders process in the background. It automates the process of launching aerender from the command line, leaving your interactive AE session unaffected. On todays multiprocessor and multi-core machines, even laptop, this luxurious experience comes with little performance penalty.

That, all by itself, is pretty much awesome. But wait, there’s more. The Pro version of the script allows you to set up post-render actions, such as emailing or text messaging yourself a note to announce the completed render. You can attach the log file to the email if you like.

You can also configure Growl notifications. You can then use any of several Growl-compatible iPhone apps, such as Prowl or Boxcar, to send push notifications to your phone.

If there’s anything better than continuing to work while After Effects renders in the background, it’s sitting in a café and having your phone tell you that an After Effects render is complete back at your desk.

All of this configured in a beautiful and intuitive GUI that docks in with the rest of the UI and saves with your custom workspaces. You’d think it was a native After Effects feature.

A beta version of this script kept me sane when I was onlining BRICK & STEEL. It’s difficult to describe just how quickly this little panel will become an essential part of your After Effects workflow. There are more features than what I’ve described here, many of which have dedicated video tutorials over at aescripts.com.

The basic version is $4.99 and the Pro version is $19.99 (see update below). Does that sound expensive? Think of it as buying Lloyd a beer or two — something you’ll be dying to do after you’ve used the free trial, which offers the full Pro functionality for two weeks.

BG Renderer at aescripts.com

Update on Monday, February 14, 2011 at 11:55PM by Stu

As promised, the prices went up to $9.99 for Basic and $29.99 for Pro. Still a great deal.

CS5 Is Alive, And Red Giant is There on Day One

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is out today, and Red Giant Software has several of their most popular plug-ins available for upgrade to 64-bit today. Check Red Giant’s 64-bit FAQ here, and a compatibility chart here.

The day-one upgrades are: 

• Magic Bullet Colorista 1.1
• Magic Bullet Mojo 1.2
• Trapcode 3D Stroke 2.6
• Trapcode EchoSpace 1.1
• Trapcode Form 1.1
• Trapcode Horizon 1.1
• Tracpdoe Lux 1.1
• Trapcode Particular 2.1
• Trapcode Shine 1.6
• Trapcode Soundkeys 1.2
• Trapcode Starglow 1.6
• Trapcode Suite 10

With more on the way soon. I want to personally thank the amazing team at Red Giant for their hard work in getting these updates out.

If you’re looking to upgrade your Production Premium to CS5, I’ve created a convenient store page here. Looking to upgrade your Master Collection? That’s here. If you have some other permutation of Adobe CS5 needs, including student/teacher editions, you can get started here.

Update on Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 9:30AM by Stu

Yesterday Magic Bullet Looks joined the 64-bit party. The Red Giant compatibly page has been updated to include the following:

• Magic Bullet Looks 1.4
• Magic Bullet Quick Looks 1.3
• Magic Bullet Suite 2009.1

Adobe CS5

If you stopped me on the street and asked me what I find compelling about Adobe Creative Suite 5, here’s what I’d say:

64-bit is a big deal for After Effects users. It may well be the end of those show-stopping “could not create image buffer” errors which have for years been the embarrassment of After Effects artists trying to do high-end work.

Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill. Finally we have actual witchcraft in an Adobe application.

Roto Brush. While the Photoshop kids are trying to content-aware remove bikinis from celebrity photos, the After Effects crowd gets to play with the Roto Brush. Does it work as well as we see in the demos? Occasionally, yes. But even when it needs a little more massaging—such as when the foreground object is complex, and the background has similar colors and textures—the experience of using Roto Brush is not only speedier than traditional rotoscoping, it’s also considerably less maddening. Think of Roto Brush as making the work of roto faster and easier, not eliminating the work, and you’ll be in love.

Premiere Pro. It’s easy to get excited by the performance features in Premiere Pro CS5. The Mercury playback engine, native editing of HDSLR footage, etc. But the real news with Premiere Pro CS5 is that the term “Pro” is, at long last, appropriate. Premiere is now good. Real good.

Amazon has CS5 Production Premium available for pre-order now, with a ship date of June 30—but the actual ship date is much sooner. I’ve created a page on the ProLost store for the various CS5 upgrade options. Every time you buy from the ProLost store, I plant a tree made of puppies in front of the Unicorn factory in your name.

Converting 30p to 24p

As the long-awaited 24p firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II draws near, I joined Mike Seymour on episode 57 of the Red Centre podcast to talk about how excited I am that it marks the end of painful workarounds for the 5D’s no-man’s-land frame rate of 30.0 frames per second.

For as long as I’ve had my 5D Mark II, I’ve avoided using it for any projects that I could not shoot 30-for-24, i.e. slowing down the footage to 23.976 fps, using every frame. My 5D has been a gentle overcrank-only camera. There are plenty of occasions to shoot 30 frames for 24 frame playback—we do it all the time in commercials to give things a little “float,” or to “take the edge off” some motion. I still do this often with my 7D. Whatever frame rate I shoot—24, 30, 50 or 60, I play it back at 24. Just like film.

Folks ask me about 30p conversions often. Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects is a popular tool for this, as is Apple’s Compressor. Adobe After Effects has The Foundry’s well-regarded Kronos retiming technology built-in. All of these solutions are variations on optical flow algorithms, which track areas within the frame, try to identify segments of the image that are traveling discretely (you and I would call these “objects”), and interpolate new frames based on estimating the motion that happened between the existing ones.

This sounds impressive, and it is. Both The Foundry and RE:Vision Effects deservedly won Technical Achievement Academy Awards for their efforts in this area in 2007. And yet, as Mike and I discuss, this science is imperfect.

In August of 2009 I wrote:

I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you use these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. This artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness.

Of course, it’s often much worse than a subtle sense that something’s not right. Quite often, stuff happens in between frames that no algorithm could ever guess. Here’s a sequence of consecutive 30p frames:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resNothing fancy, just a guy running up some stairs. But his hand is moving fast enough that it looks quite different from one frame to the next.

Here’s that same motion, converted to 24p using The Foundry’s Kronos:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resBlech.

Again, don’t get me wrong—these technologies are great, and can be extremely useful (seriously, how amazing is it that the rest of the frame looks as good as it does?). But they work best with a lot of hand-holding and artistry, rather than as unattended conversion processes.

(And they can take their sweet time to render too.)

I’m so glad we’re getting the real thing.