Here is a handy script I wrote to take care of changing the time span of frames of items in the render queue. You can selected either all render queue items or ones queued and ready to go. You can change your items to all use Entire Composition, Workspace area or your own custom time amount. This script works with after effects CS3 through CS5.5 It can work as a panel by putting in the “ScriptsUI Panel” OR standard “Scripts” folder.

At the end of every animation project, I always need to fill it with some much needed Sound FX and music to breath some life into the project. However, being new to audition I have become painfully aware that Audition will stutter with certain compressed quick times. Which one to use? Well, for me, on a mac I’ve found that Audition plays quite nice with a Quick Time Pro Res 422 Proxy file even at 1080p. Playback is smooth as butter. If you don’t have a video converter to get your file to Pro Res, may I suggest getting it straight from the horses mouth for a measly $49.95 instead of Sorenson’s Squeeze 8 Pro for 16x the price.

Perhaps you were trying to install After Effects CS5.5 or some other CS5.5 component on a Mac Mini Server a came up with the a screen full of gibberish that does you no good. Hopefully these 3 things will get you going:

1. Install latest Java OS X Lion Update
2. Enable Root User
3. Boot into safe mode, login as root user, and install

Brought to you by 3 hours of hair pulling.

With the recent release of Cinema 4D R13, there was one feature that I highly anticipated. That was the ability to write multiple channels into a single EXR frame. Why so important? Well, when you work with 4000+ frames for a sequence and use about 10 passes, that equates to 40,000 frames. Enjoy moving them from drive to drive or re-loading re-rendered assets. Instead, how about we work with just 1 file that contains all the different passes, such as ambient, diffusion, object buffers, etc.

So how do make an OpenEXR file that puts all the channels into one file? Great question! The answer wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. As my workflow is always going to After Effects to composite the passes together, this is what my output dialog looked like:

As you can see the Multi-Layer file option is grayed out and not available. What gives? Well, it’s an easy enough of an answer, you need to turn off the Save Compositing Project file option if it’s turned on. If it is on, as mine always is, it won’t let you select the Multi-Layer File option. After disabling “Save” on Compositing Project File Section, you can see that you can now make a single OpenEXR with all your render passes:

You’ll just have to save the Compositing Project File 3D data separately. If you need further information about working with OpenEXR and After Effects, visit this article from Adobe. Happy rendering.

Update 2012.26.01

It was asked on twitter by Grischa Theissen @grischatheissen (who you should follow) what the best format to use for OpenEXR. Tim Clapham @hellolux (follow him too, as well as take classes on fxphd.com from him) responded that B44 is built for realtime playback according to official exr docs, and that he uses 16bit float for smaller files unless he really needs 32bit precision.

One thing most Objective-C programmers know, like C, you can declare variables of the same type the long way, such as:

NSString *street1;
NSString *street2;
NSString *city;
NSString *state;

or the preferred short way of:

NSString *street1, *street2, *city, *state;

This is nothing new, but what you may not know, is when you are declaring matching properties, you can declare properties that share the same type in your .h file like this:

@property(nonatomic, retain) NSString *street1, *street2, *city, *state;

and in your .m file you can also do the synthesize statement with mixed vaiable types as:

@synthesize street1, street2, city, state;


If you create classes with a lot of variables, this will seriously cut down on amount of lines used just for standard variable declaration.