• Adobe After Effects

  Continuously Rasterized Animation Problem

  Posted by Bobby Gryzynger on March 12, 2012 at 8:03 pm

  I’m having some difficulty with an After Effects animation. In the project, I have made a large composition in 3D space that I then move around with an animated camera to highlight different elements. The original problem was that each element has text, and when I rendered the animation, the text and the elements with the text didn’t look very sharp. To remedy this, I turned on the continuously rasterize switch in the main composition. This worked great for sharpening the image, but it raised a new problem: now the animations of the individual elements are rendered drastically different.

  Each of these elements are nested compositions and all of their animation takes place within their individual composition; the animation itself is a rotation of the elements to reveal their backside. Now, with continuously rasterize on, the rotation animation seems to cause the elements to “pop” out in different and distracting manner, and mostly the spin no longer looks natural, which wasn’t occurring while the animation wasn’t continuously rasterized.

  The composition is 1920×1080, 29.97fps. All of the elements are photoshop files that have been scaled down to about 25% of their actual size to fit within the master composition. The elements within the photoshop files are originally from an illustrator file and have been copied and pasted into photoshop as smart objects. I am rendering the composition with Apple proRes422.

  Thanks for any help you can provide.

  Bobby Gryzynger replied 14 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Walter Soyka

  March 13, 2012 at 1:26 pm

  [Bobby Gryzynger] “Now, with continuously rasterize on, the rotation animation seems to cause the elements to “pop” out in different and distracting manner, and mostly the spin no longer looks natural, which wasn’t occurring while the animation wasn’t continuously rasterized.”

  There are a few things that can cause 3D layer interaction to break if they are inserted between 3D layers on the timeline:

  • A 2D layer
  • An adjustment layer
  • A 3D layer with a layer style applied
  • A 3D precomposition layer to which an effect, closed mask (with mask mode other than None), or track matte has been applied
  • A 3D precomposition layer without collapsed transformations

  See 3D layer interactions, render order, and collapsed transformations [link] for more.

  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
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• 

  Bobby Gryzynger

  March 14, 2012 at 9:32 pm

  Thanks for your reply.

  I ended up figuring out what the issue was in way that didn’t require me to use continuously rasterize.

  Originally, I scaled down my elements within my pre-compositions and then set their scale to 100% in the main composition. This was evidently the wrong approach.

  Instead, I scaled them back up to 100% in the pre-compositions and scaled the pre-compositions down within the main composition. When I used the camera within the main composition the resolution was retained. Although this only works because the elements within the pre-compositions were quite high resolution to begin with and I was in some sense misusing the continuously rasterize feature.

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