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Field order in pre-renderings…
Hi…
I am working to a project that has a lot of pre-compositions so I would like to pre-render and save time when I will go to the final render…
My project will be rendered in DV-PAL (lower field first) and then in uncompressed 8bit for betacam sp output (upper field first)…
What about field order for pre-renderings…?At the moment I am telling AE not to render fields for pre-renderings (I use the animation codec)… Is that right?
Or I have to pre-render everything twice with the right field order for Dv and then for BetacamSP?
thanks…
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2 Replies
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Pre-renders are used like source footage in the main comp. If they are being composited with LFF (lower field first) footage, then they should be pre-rendered as LFF.
Needless to say, if you are doing anything to the pre-renders (scaling, rotating, etc.) you need to separate fields when you import them again. In that case, I wouldn’t render fields at all for the pre-renders.
Why are you using fields at all? Why not separate fields on the original footage, then do all rendering (pre-and final-) progressive …?
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How does it look if you render progressive? If your motion isn’t too crazy that might work?
I’ve run into this before and got stung because pre-comps where a different height which messed up the fields when it came back in so I rendered the precomps progressive at double the framerate, big files but it took more or less the same time to render as a field render, apart from writing the extra frames of course.
The easiest fix is to render everything one way, either upper and lower and then reverse the field order by bringing the final render back in and nudging it a field (you’ll need to set the comp to 50fps to nudge it) in time.
You could also nudge it up or down a pixel to reverse the fields and just duplicate the bottom line that people won’t notice, in this case turn off the separate fields interpretation when you bring it back in and just do a progressive render as the fields are already in it.
If you render one field order, bring it back in and render the other field order it won’t look horrible but it will be a little soft as you end up with the interpolated fields instead of the sharp originals, by the time it gets to DV you probably wouldn’t see the difference.
Hope this helps, good call pre-rendering the nested comps, I’ve got into the habit of doing that recently, queuing all the nested comps first, post render action set to proxy and followed by the final comp, of course it fills up your drives and takes a bit longer but if you have to make a small change the next day it really pays off. I haven’t figured out a way to get his to work with a network render though as the post render actions don’t take effect using the watch folder, there must be a way using dummy files but it’s too much hassle.
Glennser
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