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Can’t Get Started in After Effects with .MOV file
Hello, very new here. I have footage i shot on a Kodak Camera. .Mov in 1280 x 720 720p HD.
And while i ma having many problems, I hink basicaly i don’t know how to get started. See, When i try to preview the footage, it runs at 10 or 11.1 fps instead of 30. When i do a RAM preview i can get about 15 seconds of preview and thats it.
My System
Windows Vista Home PremiumService Pack 1
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz 2.67 GHz
RAM 6.00 GB
64-Bit Operating System
ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
And im talking about After Effects CS4.
Any help or perhaps a link to a tutorial that can get em rolling editing this type of file would eb of great help, im so lost, lol
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6 Replies
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You may need a faster system. Core 2 Quad, maybe more ram… how many apps are you running at once? You’re working with HD footage so it’s gonna tax your system more than SD.
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to playback video in realtime form a hard drive, you need to have a hard drive that can maintain the data rate of the file… hd can create files with very high data rates. do you know what codec the .mov file is encoded with?
some codecs, like hdv, can be played out on any system that can play plain old sd dv25 footage, dvcprohd can play in realtime over firewire800 drives. other higher end codecs will require faster drives or drive arrays.
as far as 15 seconds of ram preview, that’s pretty good… remember that a ram preview plays strictly from ram, so you are limited to the number of frames that you can store in ram. even though your os is 64-bit, ae is only 32-bit, so ae is limited to 4gb, and your ram preview is a only a portion of that… about 1.8gb.
to get longer previews, you can set the resolution/down sample value from ‘full’ to ‘half’ to hold 4x the duration, you can also set the ram preview or ‘shift’-ram preview to skip frames in the time controls panel, which will also extend the duration of the ram preview.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
How can i figure out what Codec the video has?
Would converting it be a good option? I really don’t want to lose the shot so if losing some quality is a must then i will live with that.
I only have Adobe open when editing. It’s strage because my PC was the most expensive pc in best buy september 2008, i can play any game out on MAx settings, and I also can edit this video Footage in Magix Movie Edit Pro 14 no problem.
Affter Effects is what i really want to use to add Lighting to this guy in the shot, Should i be recording in a diffrent file format or with a diffrent kind of camera? I see alot of people on youtube use simple web cams to make many videos they then edit with Adobe, so is there a way to donwgrade the file to make it run better? Or should i go back to something like cs3?
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[Luis Santiago] “How can i figure out what Codec the video has? “
since it’s an mov, you can open it with quicktime, then use quicktime’s movie inspector (window>show movie inspector). it should tell you the format (which is the codec). it should also tell you the data rate of the file, which is the data rate that your drive would need to sustain to play the file in realtime.
[Luis Santiago] “I also can edit this video Footage in Magix Movie Edit Pro 14 no problem.”
if you can play the exact same file in your edit software, then it should also play fine in quicktime… so i’m going to guess that this mov file was exported from your nle. you probably have many export options from you nle. you may have chosen the lossless animation quicktime codec, which will create very large files, with very high data rates. that’s not a problem for ae, ae is not a realtime application. you can still work with that footage in ae, render it and then compress it for youtube.
youtube has frame size recommendations on their site, and i think they now recommend creating the file in the best quality possible for upload, then let youtube do the compression. so i would create your final piece to upload in a comp that is the frame size that they give, resize your footage to fit that comp size in ae (layer>transform>fit comp height/width), add you effects, render it (lossless may be fine, but if you wanted to view it first, try rendering to quicktime’s photo-jpeg, 90%) and upload it at that size.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Format: Mpeg-4 Video, 1280 x 720 Millions u-Law 2:1, Stereo, 16.000 kHz.
Movie FPS 30.00
Playing FPS 30.00Data Size 214.88 MB
Data Rate: 14.25 mbits/sec
Duration 2:06:38
Normal Size: 1280 x 720Thx for telling me how to find this out, i never knew exactly what kind of file my Digital Camer created.
This is Raw footage from my camera to my pc, i havn’t run it threw a nle yet because Premerie wouldn’t run in real time either. But i could ru it threw magix and get it ready for AE, when doen it would only be about a minute long. (its a teaser for a movie i am makign later this year) very simular to terminator 2 where lighting is crawling on the floor then on to the guy, thats it.
So is that the problem, i need to export it from my nle and then edit it in after effetcs? what type of file should i export it to? for best AE results.
And your also saying when i edit in AE it shouldn’t be in real time anyway? I understand that, guess I just need to get used to that method.
BTW thank you all for so much help thus far. I’d be lost without you.
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the data rate of the raw file is well within the data rate of any hard drive made in the 15 years, so it should play back in realtime just about anywhere except a usb1.0 drive. for reference a usb2.0 drive will sustain around 250 mbits/s, firewire400 is 400 mbits/second.
mpeg-4, however, is one of those codecs that doesn’t work well within ae (good for nle’s, bad for compositors), as is mpeg-2, h.264 and a few others…
you’d probably be best off to export your raw footage out to quicktime’s photo-jpeg at a quality around 75%. i don’t think you’ll get much noticeable loss with that codec (you could try higher quality settings if needed) and it will help keep the file sizes down, and if the destination is youtube, then the little bit of loss won’t be noticed. however, since the clip is short, you could use quicktime’s losssless animation codec… but it’s up to you, both of those codecs work well in ae.
rendering from ae, i think i’d go with photo-jpeg. at the smaller youtube frame size you should be able to view the rendered footage in realtime in quicktime, and again, i don’t think the loss will be noticeable in a youtube upload. but if you wanted to make it as clean as possible, you could render to lossless animation and upload that. again, it’s my understanding that youtube now handles the compression upon upload, but this is not something i do, so you may want to verify that process…
[Luis Santiago] “And your also saying when i edit in AE it shouldn’t be in real time anyway?”
yes, that’s why the have ram preview (zero on the number pad) vs hitting spacebar for previews like and nle. ae is capable of working with very high resolution files, high enough for imax films, however, there are few systems that could play that type of uncompressed footage in realtime. but ae can work with it and render it, the files would then get transfered to film with other hardware.
by decreasing the comp size to that of youtube, you will be able to fit far more of your comp’s preview into ram than you could with the original hd size…. i think you’ll find it fairly manageable at that point.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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