thefoundation

Production days: Spardabank Frankfurt

2008-11-04T21:20:23Z

Again we are having some working days in Frankfurt to finally set up the illumination of the Spardabank-Hessen e.G. headquarters' facade.

Matthias, David and me are sharing a room in the luxury Mövenpick Hotel next to the Frankfurt Trade Fair and – determining this choice – vis-à-vis with the Spardabank-Hessen e.G.'s headquatres!

Elevator crammed with equipment

After arriving on last sunday afternoon, we built up our tentative office in the top floors room 737. All together we have five computers, including two notebooks and one PC serving as main render client. This way we are able to keep on working, while our creations get rendered. Our daily routine includes working on AfterEffects-compositions till afternoon, en passant rendering new and final compositions as well as test screens. During todays blue hour we took some footage of the building gaining the hindmost, steelblue sunbeams of this wonderful autumn day.

David, working

Night is the time to check out how our work takes effect on the facade. From the roof garden of our hotel, we document which parts of our animation need to be altered and which geometric shapes are recognizable or not. Nearly every sequence of moving lines, dots, shapes and colors has to be altered again and again to get this last little dodge, which makes most of the capabilities of the LED-lightened facade. In the end there should exist a looped movie, shown on the facade from dawn till midnight.

We have two days left to get some new themes running on the Spardabank's facade. I am looking forward to show you some video footage of the facade, up to now this footage is still waiting to be edited. Maybe this article will see an update with video soon!

Production Days: Spardabank Frankfurt

By the way we are following the first predictions of the Potus elections, presented by ARD on the giant, muted flatscreen dangling off the wall right beside my workstation! Exciting!

AERenderer and its flaws

2008-11-01T19:24:45Z

The render system coming with After Effects provides a sophisticated set of configuration dialogs. Be careful using these options!

Working for the illuminated facade of the Spardabank Hessen e.G. headquarter in Frankfurt we have several giant (up to about 7000 pixels wide) After Effects compositions. Some of these setups take hours and hours in the process of rendering.
Due to different needs, we do not always need the full resolution. Fortunately the AERenderer has this small dialog to reduce the actual size a composition is rendered at: Render every [n]th pixel. Unfortunately this will not work as expected in every composition!

One would presume, that the rendering of just every umpteenth pixel works like a pre-rendering-resizing and besides speeds up the whole process because the pixels in between are not computed.
Not knowing exactly what causes errors at this step, I presume that there is a incompatibility of some plug-ins with this functionality of the renderer. Which is especially irksome, since some of the most performance-consuming effects will cause errors in the final display, e. g. the glow effect.

The last composition I had to render wanted to have about 50 hours of full power from my MacBook Pro (2.33 gigahertz, 2 gigabyte RAM) in full resolution. The rendering of every twentieth pixel resulted in a way darker image, than the full resolution rendering. Large parts of the composition are lightened by the mentioned glow effect. In the end I decided to render full resolution in low quality. This took about twenty hours.

Maybe Adobes hands are tied since some plug-ins are programmed by third parties, but at least the default effects supplied by Adobe should work properly. Perhaps this option is not used frequently, so that there is low interest in solving this problem. Perhaps just few people know about this possibility. Anyhow Adobe should improve the rendering process as soon as possible.