Combustion Eye for the AE Guy
Page 7 of 7
Step 14: The last Operator I want to add to the Text layer is a Directional Blur. In After Effects this is called Directional Blur, but in combustion it is called an Unconstrained Gaussian Blur.
Highlight the text element in the Workspace, Right+Click, and select Blur/Sharpen>Unconstrained Gaussian Blur. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Make sure the Animate button is still turned on. Go to 2:00 in the Timeline (/) and under the Unconstrained Gaussian Blur Tab set the Vertical Radius to 30.
Move to 3:00 in the Timeline and set the Vertical Radius to 0. Because we have the Animate button turned on, the keyframes are created automatically for us, and we end up with a nice streaky blur.
Step 15: With our project complete it is now time to render it out. Press Command+R on the Mac or Control+R on the PC to bring up the Render Panel.
Everything under the Output Settings Tab is pretty self explanatory for those who are familiar with the After Effects Render Window, so just use the settings you need for your project. I am going to render the animation out using the QuickTime Uncompressed (Animation Compressor) preset.
Don’t forget to name your file and place it in the appropriate folder.
When you are ready, click on the Process button and away it goes.
One thing I discovered while rendering this animation is that combustion 3 seems to be quite a bit slower than After Effects 6.0. For this exercise, I tested the render speeds on two different systems, using the same settings in each project. The only difference between the combustion and After Effects projects is the blur on the Text For combustion I used Unconstrained Gaussian Blur, while in After Effects I used the closest thing – Directional Blur. The two computers used in this test were Sheeta my 2.76Ghz Sony Vaio notebook with 512MB of RAM, and Nadia, my Dual Gig G4 with 1GB of RAM. Here are the results:
Sheeta
Combustion 8:25
After Effects 3:08
Nadia
Combustion 15:07
After Effects 5:13
I contacted discreet about this, but as of this writing have not received a reasoning or solution. For those of you following along at home, you can download both the After Effects and combustion project files in SIT format here. Note: The project files do not include the Artbeats footage, so you will need to replace those files with your own.
A possible solution would be to increase the amount of RAM in the RenderQueue Preferences to something like 87%. Theoretically the more RAM you make available for rendering, the faster the process should go. I tried flushing the RAM Cache prior to rendering, but that did nothing to improve speed. I will do some additional tests in the near future that looks at Render Speeds between the two applications.
Hopefully this first look at the workflow differences between After Effects and Combustion has been useful to you. Look for future Combustion Eye for the AE Guy (or Gal) segments in the future where I will examine the differences between the Text and Type tool, how the two compositing applications work with 3D applications, 3D in combustion, 3rd Party Plug-ins, and setting up network rendering.
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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