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HDV footage taking forever to preview
I’ve got an mpeg2, 1280×720, 23.976, almost 4gb file of a 7 minute short film imported into after effects. I’ve got the viewer resolution down to quarter, the video on draft in the timeline, and the ram preview resolution down to quarter. That’s all I know of doing in order to make it play smoothly, or at the very least not take 10 seconds to render each frame I stop on. Is there any other way to make HDV manageable in after effects? I’m trying to put some colorista effects on it to export back out.
Is it really that I have to be patient? I swear I’ve seen HDV After Effects tutorials and it never took them literally between 7 and 12 seconds to load the frame every time they moved the timeline indicator.
The computer I’m using is:
dual 3.7GHz xeon processors
4GB ram
a Fire GL 1GB video card. -
21 Replies
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MPEG2 files use intra-frame compression, whereas After Effects is an inter-frame based app. Put another way, intra-frame files are served up in blocks of frames, whereas AE expects individual frames that it can’t really find in your video, so it takes forever. All MPEG formats seem to choke AE horribly.
Bottom line is, in my experience, HDV is useless. It is really low quality for HD (4:2:0) and a nightmare in post from the edit to After Effects to output.
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All true. AE doesn’t like HDV much.
But there’s one little anal-retentive thing: it’s the other way around regarding “Intraframe” vs. “Interframe”.
Intraframe = within each frame, or spatial (AE)
Interframe = between frames, or temporal (MPEG-2)Technically, HDV/MPEG-2 uses both. I’ve been guilty of that small error too. 🙂
https://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/mmedia/casestdy/ucl/app1.htm
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There is aplugin for Premiere that accelerates work with HDV, I believe that it is called cineform…I am unsure as to whether this would offer any benefit in AE, but it would be worth looking into.
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Hm. Ok, thanks.
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Well, the file we are working with is an exported movie in mpeg2. HDV is (as far as I know) no longer part of the equation.
We had an unresolved problem moving the edit from premiere to after effects some time ago (and asked about it here) so we’ve made an export of the whole 7 minute movie for coloring in After Effects. Having just the one video layer has been helpful.
Speed’s still an issue though. We can work with any quality or codec we need to, depending on the suggestions from the gang here. What would be faster than mpeg2 in After Effects for 1280x720HD/24p footage?
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I’ve had “uncompressed” files of it that were in the low teens of gigs. I figured the larger the file the slower it’d be though. Will going with lossless really make it faster to load in After Effects or are we just talking about quality at this point?
The problem we were having before with importing a Premiere file into After Effects was that the file was too big and would crash when we tried to load it all, but that was just a copy and paste of the timeline and it was trying to load all the individual clips. I guess the different in the two at similarly large sizes is just that the exported file was only one to load and the timeline was many pieces.
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photo jpeg is a common codec to convert your hdv to, if you can’t afford the disk space of losseless or uncompressed footage. it is lossey, but with a setting around the 90% range, it’s pretty good, and will save you some disk space.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
ae won’t choke on large file size… it only needs to load one frame at a time.
it will choke on interfame compression. with this compression ae has to load more than one frame to generate the one frame it needs to ‘effect’. and that is the slow down…. it has to composite a single frame from multiple frames, then composite the other layers and effects that you have on that frame… more work = longer render time.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Hm. I’ll see if I can get something good out of that then. I’ve had a world of pain trying to compress things. I can actually compress things to look better at really small, youtube sized files than large ones that I can still work with. In fact, all the settings for “uncompressed” I’ve tried give me a giant file, but still is all pixelly, which really doesn’t make any sense to me.
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Heh. Well if I could afford an HDCam camera, perhaps I’d get it!
It’s the JVC GYHD100. It doesn’t shoot 1080i, but it does do 720p for real. I always export it as square pixels, and it comes in at square pixels.
Actually, the pixelly uncompressed files are just straight out of Premiere before I even put them into After Effects. It just seems to be doing SOMETHING to it when exporting it, despite me specifically telling it not to. Maybe it’s too much to ask of programs or computers to just spit out an avi of uncompressed HD.
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