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Just cant get the quality in AE output!
Hi guys,
I’m a total newbie at AE and wonder if someone can point me in the right direction.
I’ve been asked by a local guy (Wedding Videographer) to create something a little more exciting for his titles than just a standard set of titles which fade in/fade out. He’s using a Sony DSR250 PAL DVCAM, 4:3, 25fps camera, and has understandably asked for the Titles to replicate these settings.
I’m keen to use AE to do this, and to date have found it very interesting. My problem is, that with the exception of one particular “test” title, all of them look terrible – artifacts, soft edges, even to the point of being blurred after final output.
The only success I’ve had, was to create a high quality composition (HDTV1080P), and then output it as an FLV file – this looks acceptable, and reasonably sharp, however once we add it to Encore & build the DVD, it’s back to being soft again when viewed on a normal domestic TV.
I’ve tried using various rendering settings in AE (H.264, FLV etc), and tweeking CBR, VBR, 1 / 2 pass, high rendering etc., and also tried importing the raw AE project (aep & aepx files)into Premiere Pro, but even then, the pixelation within Premiere pro looks terrible – even on the program & preview windows, so there’s little point is trying to export from here. Settings in both AE & Premiere Pro, are set to Full Resolution, so I’ve no idea why a simple title sequence should look this bad. The basic titles in PP look great – sharp, crisp, so what on earth am I doing wrong?
Any ..”ANY” advice or help here (link to another post maybe), to learn how to output as a crisp, sharp, clean, clear title sequence which retains it’s clarity when burned to DVD . . . . would be most welcome.
Thanks
Scott
(iMac 27″ Quad Core / 8Gb RAM / ATI Radeon HD 4850)Absolute Newbie to all this video stuff – must try harder to learn more.
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5 Replies
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DVD-video is specced to standard definition. You can’t get get HD video on it. If you need HD get a blu-ray burner.
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Hi Tero
Thanks for your response . . . but as I mentioned the problem exists even outside of any kind of DVD burning.
Something I’m missing somewhere. I’ve checked out some of the tutorials online, but simply can’t find anything (yet) relating to output quality.
I understand that AE may not be the best way to create a final composition, but even bringing it into Media Encoder or premiere is not giving me the quality I’d expect.
Someone somewhere must have a workflow for SD, HD projects?
Have found a few useful posts on this site, and I’m slowly going through them – but any help which would speed up the learning process is greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Absolute Newbie to all this video stuff – must try harder to learn more.
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If you are producing a video file for playback on a DVD, there is absolutely no reason to work in HD.
Now, to get nice, crisp text out of AE, make sure you are doing your rendering settings correctly. You will need to make sure you are rendering fields that match the footage and pixel aspect ratio that matches the footage.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Hi Michael,
Many thanks for the advice, yes it’s certainly something I overlooked to begin with – I’m doing more testing and seem to be able to get a fairly decent quality output using the flv settings.
Not all of the compositions will be used for DVD, so I need to find a workflow which produces high quality results each & every time consistently.
I’m reading all sorts of comments about AE not being the preferred method to create the final composition? Is this actually the case?
Regards
ScottAbsolute Newbie to all this video stuff – must try harder to learn more.
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I wouldn’t use AE for your final output, no.
I tend to render an uncompressed (or relatively uncompressed) file from AE and use the Adobe Media Encoder or Quicktime Pro to create the final file.
After Effects can’t do multipass encoding. Multipass encoding gets you better picture quality at smaller file sizes.
Good codecs to render into include Quicktime with the PNG codec (technically lossless) or Quicktime with the JPEG codec (at high quality levels it’s close to lossless and has a smaller file size).Then you would use the compression software to make your final compression or drop the lossless file into Encore and let it compress for DVD.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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