Posted by nappy on 01/20/08 19:53

"Spex" <No.spam@ta.com> wrote in message
news:13p62e9asvcob0a@corp.supernews.com...
> nappy wrote:
>> "Spex" <No.spam@ta.com> wrote in message
>> news:13p39vka9k7hp7c@corp.supernews.com...
>>> You should consider baking groups. If you have groups that are causing
>>> a tremendous slow down like particles or blurs and blooms then select
>>> the group, hit Export and in the export dialog set the After Export
>>> option to Import into project. Turn off the original group and carry on
>>> working in realtime. Come final render time delete all the baked groups
>>> and turn on all the original layers.
>>>
>>
>> Yes. I do this a lot in Combustion. "Commit to Disk" You can switch
>> between the workspace and the disk files. It didn't do much in Motion ..
>> for us anyway.
>>
>>
>>
>>> This is such a "well known" workflow so I'd expect in future versions of
>>> Motion that this becomes more automatic i.e selecting a group then
>>> hitting "Bake."
>>>
>>> Which GPU do you have?
>>
>> 7300
>
> That's one of your problems right there! Apple's nVidia drivers are shit.
> The recommended card is the ATI 1900XT. The nVidia drivers are said to be
> 3 times less efficient on similar hardware. But the 7300 is not a very
> good card anyway. It is a night and day difference between the 1900XT and
> the 7300. Again Color requires the 1900XT too.
>

Spex. The 7300 is running the standard nVidia drivers I believe. And Color
does run on the 7300. Although we started with 3 monitors on the main
workstation we had to go down to 2 becuse Color did NOT run on three. It
wouldn't even start !

>
>>
>>> You can import cameras into Motion BTW. I'm told Motion can also deal
>>> with 3D objects but as of now requires an importer to be written. There
>>> is certainly a lot of potential in this app.
>>
>> From which sources? What format. We could not find that info..
>
> PFtrack, PFHoe. Admittedly not a huge number of 3rd parties have
> supported Motion cameras but it is possible. I use PFTrack and have
> imported the Camera into Motion.

Hmm. I will have to see if Boujou cameras work.. Sometime when I have a
weekend to mess with it. Again it performed so poorly even with the simplest
comps that we haven't messed with it since.




>
>>
>>>> I wish you lived closer. I could use your help on this TV series.
>>>>
>>>> Nobody uses rich pixel formats? I find them very useful for carrying
>>>> velocity, Z and material / object data form 3D apps.. Waddya mean
>>>> nobody uses them? Am I alone here? :)
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Of course you are not the only one who uses z, id and vector passes etc
>>> but I've yet to see rpf files used. They were never taken up because
>>> Autodesk were never that forthcoming about them so wide support by other
>>> apps was patchy at best. It is usual for a compositor to receive the
>>> buffer passes as .iffs or pngs etc.
>>
>>
>> Hmm.. interesting. We work with many who do use rpf files a lot .
>> Especially between 3dsmax and Combustion. It is a common workflow.
>> Due a lot to the rpf motion blur feature which can be a good sub for 3d
>> motion blur.
>>
>
> 3dMax-->Combustion was one of the few workflows that actually fully works.
> I can understand why you use it in your case but not in a Maya-->Shake
> workflow which is _the_ most common pipeline I've worked in. OpenEXR is
> the multi-channel HDR file format of choice now. Motion is supporting
> that rather than rpf.

We're not using OpenEXR here at this point. I haven't had much time to
actually contemplate our workflow. I am so busy trying to turn out shots
that it hasn't been a big issue which file format we use.

That said.. I am always interested in your expertise Spex. Thanks for the
input.

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