• Adobe After Effects

  Help with AE Photo Montage quality

  Posted by Tim Kuhlman on July 5, 2007 at 1:46 pm

  Can someone please give me some advice on how to make my photo montages in AE look better? I have tried playing around with settings and formats and it still looks terrible. Basically, I am trying to find a reliable workflow for going from photoshop to AE to FCP and then to DVD.
  First of all, is there an ideal photo format (jpeg, raw, tiff, psd etc..) that my still photos should be in when working with them in AE.

  After my montage is done, what is the best way to render it out from AE to maximize quality?

  Then going into FCP and then to compressor? Please any advice would be greatly appreciated.

  Brendan Coots replied 19 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Tylor Larson

  July 5, 2007 at 2:24 pm

  Well from my past experiences with Photos here is what i ask all my clients for.
  1. the highest quality photos. any formate work. but uncompressed Tiffs, Raw or PSD are the best.
  – remember crap in crap out… if some one give you crap tell them they will not get much better.
  2. What ever your FCP sequence setting are is what you should set your AE comp to.
  – also make sure when you render out of AE you are using animation codecs. This way it is the highest quality and has no compression on it.

  Remember that compression does what it says… at a cost. compression kills some data along the way. examples are colors or audio quality. Also try and find out where the video looks good and then suddenly looks like crap. it might be in the last step with the video compression. maybe try a different compression software.. like squeeze. Im a big fan of squeeze.

  Cheers,
  Lowtech
• 

  Brendan Coots

  July 5, 2007 at 6:38 pm

  If the pictures you’re using fill the entire frame, then you need to start with images that are at least 720X480 native size (as in, not scaled up to meet this size requirement). If you are zooming in on them, they need to be even larger.

  When you render out of After Effects, use the Animation codec as was mentioned, with quality set to 100%. Import them into FCP and proceed as normal. The only rub is that you might need to render out your FCP timeline every time you make changes since the image animations will be in Animation codec instead of your timeline’s codec (which is probably 8-bit NTSC or some such).

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