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AE to FCP field render problem
Hello,
At work I’m using After Effects 6.5 for an animated television show. We are rendering our compositions from a comp that is 720 x 486, D1 pixels, with lower fields to an animation compressor. When we bring our Quicktimes into Final Cut Pro we have large jagged breaks in the image quality, not the smooth movement we expect. We tried switching to upper fields and got the same result. We’re using the latest version of Final Cut. My suspicion is that it’s something on Final Cut’s end of things and not AE’s. Has anyone else experienced and (better yet) solved this problem?
Scott
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4 Replies
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Can you describe the motion? Straight-line? Horizontal?
Do you see the breaks on a still image?
What are the sequence settings in FCP? Do they match your footage size?
Do you see the breaks on a television monitor?
Are the breaks spatial (picture) or temporal (motion)? (you mention breaks in image but also un-smooth motion)Steve
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The motion we’re creating is somewhat typical camera motion, pans so that the back ground moves horizontally in either direction, zoom ins and outs, character movement. By the way, character animation was done in Flash at 30fps, while our After Effects files are all set up at 29.97. -Don’t know if that plays into the problem, but I’ll likely do a test for that at a later time.
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Thanks. How about the other questions? 🙂
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Well, we got to the bottom of the whole thing here. Just had to endure a night of perplexed, cold sweat, insomnia. The answer is kinda complicated, but it boils down to a frame rate problem. We’re working with Flash animation at 30fps. As everyone knows video isn’t quite 30fps, and this isn’t too much of a problem for about the first 15 seconds of our comps. After that point the drop-frame starts to rear its ugly head and After Effects tries to compensate by splitting the animation over the two fields. Works OK for anything that’s animated in After Effects since the keyframes are set up to accomodate this, but for the stuff that’s animated originally in Flash, well… let’s just say that it becomes incredibly obvious how Flash really isn’t yet suited to video.
I’m just glad that I now know what the problem is. Thank you for your help, guys
S
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