Monday, December 12, 2005
David Em is a well known fine artist who was one of the first to use computers in his work. His work is often incorporated into my column, and his observations on computer graphics are based on his experiences in using hardware and software.
With the advent of the new BYTE we will begin incorporating David's Graphics Report back into the column. Meanwhile, a report:
Here is something quick that came up last night:
One of the most popular video post-production packages in the business is Adobe's After Effects 3.1. It's very powerful, comparatively inexpensive (under $2000 for the pro version), relatively easy to learn, and used by major production houses, including George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic.
After Effects used to be a Mac-only program that, along with Equilibrium’s DeBabelizer was the major reason multimedia producers were dedicated to that platform. When both programs were ported to NT a couple of years ago, a much wider user started using them.
One problem I’ve always had with After Effects is that when importing files into it, I could never get standard Windows file opening conventions such as drag-selecting or Shift-clicking to work properly, especially with the industry-standard Adobe Illustrator .ai file format. The file would import, but when I tried to invoke them, After Effects would crash.
After Effects has a provision to open multiple files one-by-one in an Open Window, which is a real pain in the butt if you have a lot of files you’re working with, but I’ve learned to live with it. Then last night, all of a sudden, any imported .ai file crashed the program. After trying every variation I could think of multiple times over a two hour period, including deleting the program’s preferences files, I finally reinstalled the program, but it didn’t help: .ai files still crashed it.
All I could think of was that there must be a deeply buried Windows Registry setting that had gone awry, a concept that sent chills down my spine, and not the right kind, either. So I installed the software on another machine, our Intergraph TDZ 2000, and it worked fine, which seemed to confirm the Registry idea.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Alex had heard my increasing streams of expletives and table-pounding, and had been doing a little Web sniffing. Remarkably, he found the undocumented source of the problem: having a couple hundred fonts installed on a machine causes After Effects to crash, even if none of them are in use.
Since Adobe After Effects is tuned to work hand-in-hand with Adobe Illustrator, and since most Illustrator users use it in connection with fonts – I imagine the typical Illustrator use probably has lots more fonts loaded than we do – I suspect quite a few folks out there may be experiencing related problems.
So we deleted some fonts, and guess what? Not only does the program work again, I can now import files in selected groups without causing After Effects to implode.
Who knows why the program chose last night to manifest all this, when nothing on the system is different than it was the day before. I’m glad the god of video (like YHWH, he is often an angry god) chose to let us in on this little tidbit, else tonight I’d probably be learning things about the Windows NT registry I hope I never need to know.
