• Adobe After Effects

  avoiding degradation in multi pre-render pipeline

  Posted by Tom Ma on August 8, 2012 at 2:42 am

  I have a pipeline, that requires pre-rendering, comping, rendering again. probably 4 cycles in total before final render.

  Question is: what intermediate format is recommended?
  TIFF 16-bit? will 8-bit work? DPX? Pro Rez 4:4:4?

  Footage is starting out as a CR2 camera raw sequence.

  I’d like to avoid softening, or color shifts, any degredation, but also have “lighter” files that are quicker to work with.

  thanks.

  Tom Ma replied 13 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Walter Soyka

  August 8, 2012 at 1:35 pm

  [Tom Masters] “I have a pipeline, that requires pre-rendering, comping, rendering again. probably 4 cycles in total before final render.”

  That’s kind of a lot. Do you absolutely need to pre-render, or could you perhaps work with proxies [link] and do a full render at the end?

  [Tom Masters] “Question is: what intermediate format is recommended? TIFF 16-bit? will 8-bit work? DPX? Pro Rez 4:4:4?”

  TIFF 16-bit is your highest quality option, but it will also produce the largest files.

  All the other options are also decent choices; just remember that TIFF (8-bit) and DPX (10-bit) may accumulate slight rounding or quantization errors over four generations and ProRes is lightly compressed.

  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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• 

  Keith Mcgregor

  August 8, 2012 at 6:39 pm

  Can’t have it both ways, if you don’t want to degrade your footage then you cannot have small files, this info takes space. Your best bet is using the lossless option, a photoshop sequence or don’t pre-render, just precomp and keep stacking em. Are you running out of memory? (edit>purge) is the project that huge? (proxies, half resolution files) I find it odd you are doing it this way since AE can hold a ton of data and effects stacked and multiple precomps, but each to their own I guess.
  Are you using video footage? I assume you are using stills arranged in a sequence. In AE you don’t need the high resolution photos as video will always be only 72 pixels per inch, whereas photos can be 300 and upward DOTS per square inch. Lowering your resolution will save you a ton of memory and improve performance. Your output size also needs to be taken into account. If you aren’t going to 4k then they don’t need to be full size at all, just the size of your final output.
  Hope this helps!
  -Keith

  ps- don’t touch the 444 as I have seen nothing but noise from it. (my experience only)

  Reality? What did you make it?
• 

  Tom Ma

  August 8, 2012 at 9:49 pm

  yes, proxy mode is probably best.
  There is strange mix of using photoshop to paint a few of the sequence frames along the process, but I suppose I could proxy those as well.

  thanks as always!

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