Moving scenes to AE and dealing with lag

[Uncomfortable Laughter]

Hi, I have been working with CH for a couple of months now and I have a couple of really beefy scenes that are causing some lag and it is hard to work like this. I have seen some videos by digital puppets saying you can lower the resolution and resize your puppets to help with this but those videos seem dated. Is this really the best workaround? I have about 10 characters for this scene and they are all moving a bunch and are using the camera for different shots. This is in CH and I have yet to export this to AE. Would exporting it to AE and then using the render feature help with the lag? Would I export the entire scene including all the characters or do a scene for each character and then line them up in AE? Just trying to learn the best way to do things because I am still new to this stuff. 

[David Arbor]

I would create one scene per character, then render out a video file (ProRes 422 is going to give you better playback in After Effects than MP4 since it is far less compressed). Having a separate scene for each character allows you to make changes for each one without having to re-render your mega scene of all 10 character just because you want to make a minor change. 

I would avoid using Dynamic Link to bring your .chproj into AE for this project since it sounds like you have a lot going on and it will process very slowly.

[Uncomfortable Laughter]

Hi, how would I go about doing this exactly? I have all my characters in
one scene will everything is mostly done. Is there a way to copy and paste
a puppet from one scene to another? Also, how does one go about making sure
everything is lined up since we are making a bunch of scenes for each
character so you can't see them interacting at all?

[Uncomfortable Laughter]

Hello could you please play plain to me how I would take a character from a scene and make it it's own scene? I'm trying to comp 3 scenes in ae but it freezes with ram errors every time and everything is super slow 

[Uncomfortable Laughter]

Hello I still need help with this 

[David Arbor]

Hi, sorry for the delay, I was away for a bit.

You'll have to figure out the workflow that works best for you since there's no perfect setup here. In the past when I've wanted to combine multiple characters but have individual comps, I've taken this approach:

1. I'll make a new comp in Character Animator and drag indivdual comps into it, then I can place each character where I want. You can copy and paste a puppet from one comp to another, but then you lose the indivudal comp for each puppet.
2. I'll take this mega comp with all my characters combine and use Dynamic Link to bring the project into After Effecst (you can do this by importing your .chproj into AE and choosing the desired sequence). This will only be a reference since comps rendered via Dynamic Link perform much more slowly. 
3. Then I render each of my character comps as individual files as ProRes 4444 with Alpha
4. Import those QuickTime files into After Effects
5. Place the rendered files on top of the Dynamically Linked reference comp

And now I have an entire scene in AE which mimics my Character Animator scene, but it's much more performant since ProRes plays back very smoothly. Then if I want to adjust the movements on any character, I can render a new ProRes file and overwrite or update the existing file.

You don't have to do any of this is you don't have a lot of characters, your scene is short, or your performance is good, but the more characters you have in one scene and the longer the scene is, the slower things will be.

[Uncomfortable Laughter]

Hi would you mind creating a short video explaining this? I cannot find a way to copy and paste a puppet into another scene and retain all the animation data. I have been all over the internet and there does not seem to be any documentation of this.

[David Arbor]

Sorry, I'm unable to make a screen recording today, but you can drag your puppet into a new sequence, select all of your animation in the timeline, copy, then paste it to the instance of your puppet in the other sequence. Then it's as easy as adjusting the position of the animations in time. Make sure, though, that if you have any parameters you modified on the first instance of the puppet, that you push them to the Source puppet, otherwise you'll have to make the same adjustments in the Properties panel.