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Gradiant Color Looks Wrong
Hello,
I’m very new to After Effects so forgive me if this is a stupid question. I am creating a small intro for movies that I want to use for uploading to youtube. I have used the ramp effect on a solid red layer and have created a nice red to dark red gradient effect to use as my background. The trouble is that when I render this out to a wmv file the gradient background does not look to good, it looks like the colors have been reduced and the gradient looks “blocky” instead of smooth as it does in After Effects. I know I am compressing the file but I am using the maximum quality settings for the wmv file and I have also rendered out to trying DivX and Xvid with the result the same. Can anybody help me with this?, or know what the problem is… the Intro is only 16 seconds long.
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3 Replies
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Check your render settings to make sure you’re rendering to millions of colors, I never render to WMV so I can’t give you any specific information for that.
I can tell you, though, that I’ve heard that YouTube will let you get away with much better quality if you upload your file in the flash video .flv format (which is what they convert everything to anyway).
If you’re going to use this as a leader for videos you can pre-render it losslessly (which will give you a very large file) and then for each video you’re going to upload to YouTube: import it into AE, stick it on the beginning of your video and export the whole thing out to .flv (This is under File > Export, not accessible in the render queue).
If anyone has more experience with uploading flash video to YouTube I’d encourage them to join in on the conversation, I don’t do much online distribution so this is all through the grape vine =)
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Thank you for your input. I had better results when I rendered the file out uncompressed and then rendered it out in Quicktime Pro using the H264 codec. It still wasn’t perfect but it was better so that’s always a bonus. I will try and render the next movie as FLV from AE as you described to try and see if that gives better results. I also heared that although Youtube resizes the movies to 320×240 res when you upload them it’s best when working in AE to create comps with the standard DV NTSC/PAL resolutions and then render out the files to 320×240 as working with higher resolutions at the beginning gives you better results.
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you might also try adding noise to the gradient, either to the same layer or on another solid above the gradient and use a blending mode to mix them.
i’ve seen similar problems rendering to dv25 and adding noise has helped smooth a subtle gradient blend… it wasn’t perfect, but better. it will take a little experimenting with the amount of noise and blending (if its on another solid) to get it right.
warning on h264… it is a geat looking codec, but it is very demanding on procecssing… if you are using it to post on the web, many people won’t have the processing power to decode the file in realtime.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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