• Adobe After Effects

  Comp Settings for DVD

  Posted by Eelander O’brien on April 11, 2011 at 2:03 am

  Hello!
  I am looking for some insightful thoughts about AE comp settings for an animation that will be played on a wide screen television. After filtering through threads speaking of very specific situations, it seems like I need to start my own for maximum effectiveness, so I apologize for yet another DVD thread.

  Anyway, My animation is going to be a photo-montage of different moving images, there will be no filmed footage used. It will need to be on a DVD (North America) and will be played on a wide screen television, but not an HDTV.

  What setting should I use for the composition settings (dims, preset, pixel ratio, frame rate, etc) as well as the rendering settings? What are the best options for converting it for use on a DVD? Also, there will be audio, so any thoughts on where in the process this should be added would be very helpful.

  This thread has some great information at the bottom that seems to fit my context, But as for specific settings, I am not really sure. I am very new to AE, so any insight would be more than appreciated! I am sure that more information might be needed so please let me know if you need to hear anything more about my project.

  Thanks,
  Cpt. Eelander O’Brien

  Eelander O’brien replied 15 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Joey Foreman

  April 11, 2011 at 4:04 am

  NTSC/DV Widescreen, 29.97 or 23.976 f.ps., depending on your taste for a particular look, encoded to an uncompressed or high bit depth codec (ProRes 422(HQ), Tiff sequence).

  Take that into a media encoder like Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder and output an MPEG2 with the highest data rate acceptable for the duration of your footage. These encoders have companion audio setting presets for the MPEGS.

  Joey Foreman
  Editor/Compositor/VFX Artist
• 

  Eelander O’brien

  April 12, 2011 at 12:53 am

  Thank you for the quick response.

  What is a desirable composition size for an animation that will be on a healthy sized television? 720×480 seems a bit small.

  I am very new to this, how would I go about encoding something like a TIFF sequence?

  As far as the output of the animation from AE, do I keep it a .mov?

  Thanks, you have been a huge help thus far
• 

  Joey Foreman

  April 12, 2011 at 3:43 am

  Yes 720×480 is small, but that’s what dvds are – standard def. For HD you have to author to BluRay.

  For a Tiff sequence, you choose that in the Output Module, rather than a Quicktime movie.

  If you encode to ProRes 422 or Animation, it will be a .mov.

  To gain the color space advantages of ProRes or Tiff, set your AE project to 16 or 32 bit.

  Joey Foreman
  Editor/Compositor/VFX Artist
• 

  Eelander O’brien

  April 17, 2011 at 9:16 pm

  Thanks Joey, I appreciate your help thus far. I have a few new questions that hopefully you can answer pretty quickly:

  What is the best image type to use for a photo montage animation?

  NTCS DV wide screen seems to skew circles and squares, is it possible to use a different preset for sub compositions and export the main composition as a NTCS DV widescreen to avoid this? any thoughts would be great

  Finally, my audio is a WAV. file that sounds fine when rendered, but in RAM preview the audio is slowed down and really distorted. Any ideas? This makes it nearly impossible to queque the animation with the audio so I really hope you can help me!

  Thanks,
  Eelander

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