• Adobe After Effects

  rendering problems

  Posted by Sam Needham on January 18, 2011 at 4:47 pm

  Hello,

  I’m having real problems with after effects cs3. I have a bunch of very short avi’s in 1280 X 720 (25fps) format that I’m trying to render out into a movie in ae. I have no problem rendering them out as a full movie, the only trouble is the quality suffers greatly, no matter how uncompressed, best, full resolution etc I have the settings. I’ve tried so many combinations it’s driving me nuts. I would just do this in premiere but I’m going to need to add png watermarks and stuff later. Can anyone please help?

  Thanks,

  Sam

  Walter Soyka replied 15 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 8 Replies
• 8 Replies

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  January 18, 2011 at 4:58 pm

  What compression do the .avi files use. What compression are you trying to render at? Do you have the latest CS3 updates installed?

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
• 

  Sam Needham

  January 18, 2011 at 6:27 pm

  Thanks very much for the lightning responses. The avi’s were render out first from maya (the compressor is called Microsoft Video 1, and the animations were all 25 fps) They were all rendered out at HD 720. I don’t know if this changes the frame rate, but I just looked on after effects and there’s not even an option to set the comp to 50 fps, just 59. something. And yes I have all the updates.

  What am I doing wrong?
• 

  Walter Soyka

  January 18, 2011 at 6:40 pm

  [Sam Needham] “The avi’s were render out first from maya (the compressor is called Microsoft Video 1”

  Egads. These must look awful — Microsoft Video 1 tops out at 16 bits per pixel (not 16 bpc, 16 bpp!). You should use just about anything else.

  For 3D renders, I always use image sequences.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
  Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  January 18, 2011 at 6:48 pm

  There ya go- Dave and Walter covered everything. My suggestion, ask for file sequences (tiff, tga…) to be sure you get uncompressed stuff.

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
• 

  Walter Soyka

  January 18, 2011 at 6:57 pm

  [Tudor "Ted" Jelescu] “My suggestion, ask for file sequences (tiff, tga…) to be sure you get uncompressed stuff.”

  Just a small piece of pedantry — TIFF (which I have heard stands for “Thousands of Incompatible File Formats”) can use either lossy or lossless compression. I wouldn’t put it past someone who renders to MSVC-encoded AVIs to use a lossy variant!

  Make sure you specify “uncompressed” or “lossless” when you ask for TIFF files.

  TGA files are always lossless, though they are limited to 32 bpp.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
  Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
• 

  Sam Needham

  January 18, 2011 at 8:16 pm

  Yes, you’re right, I’m an animator not a renderer. The thing is, the avi’s look fine until they go into after effects. I’d be quite happy with the quality they are at the moment but ae degrades them much worse.

  Thanks.
• 

  Sam Needham

  January 19, 2011 at 12:47 am

  Now I rendered an avi from maya using no compression. The avi plays in slow, staggered time in my media players. I then rendered this out uncompressed in AE and the image is the same (which is that problem solved, thankyou) but the playback is still slower and staggered than it should be. Is this normal?

  Thanks,

  Sam
• 

  Walter Soyka

  January 19, 2011 at 1:14 pm

  [Sam Needham] “I then rendered this out uncompressed in AE and the image is the same (which is that problem solved, thankyou) but the playback is still slower and staggered than it should be. Is this normal?”

  Yes. Intermediate renders like this are meant to preserve the image for additional production use, not to be played back. The data rate for uncompressed video is very high, and a single hard drive can’t read the data back from disk fast enough to play in real time. If you go through frame by frame, you’ll see that everything is there.

  If you want to play it back in real time, you could transcode your lossless intermediate to a more playback-friendly codec like H.264 or WMV. These formats are intended for playback, not for production use.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
  Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

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