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Large screen playback – help needed on resolution, sizes and rendering settings
Hi all, I apologise in advance for my lack of technical knowledge…
I have a stop-frame animation to create using a sequence of between 100-300 photos that I will be supplied with (they’ve not been taken yet so I don’t know how many there’ll be until next week). The budget and time-frame for the job is very tight so I’ve decided to create the animation in After Effects 6.5 since it’s the only relevant software I have access to and have the most experience with (I’m a print-based graphic designer by trade and have only done motion graphics/animation at college not for the ‘real world’ as it were).
The final PAL movie will be shown on 16:9 plasma screens (not sure of size, but I think should be no more than 28 inches) and also on a large screen which I believe will be about 8-10 feet wide (also 16:9 I’m told).
Before the images are processed (RGB jpgs ok?), how large would I need them? (the movie will need to be as high-def as possible) How close to the size of the large screen will they need to be in order for them to be as clear as possible? At what point will pixel size need to be taken into account? I need to send the photographers instructions asap before the shoot begins.
Also, what things will I need to do/remember when rendering the finished movie? What codecs will be best, etc? Will I need to do different things for the different sizes of playback even if the aspect ratio is the same?
Again, I apologise for my lack of knowledge on the subject, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks 🙂
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8 Replies
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Andy,
I’m not exactly sure what it is that you’re asking, but I’ll try and clear as much up as I can. First off, you’ll want to work with the same resolution, regardless of whether it’s being projected, printed onto film, or shown on plasma TV’s.
No, RGBs will NOT work. Go with a TIFF sequence,
which is the industry standard.
I would say since you’re exporting to a 16:9 format, just set your composition to 1920×1080, which is full high-def – 16:9, then crop off your photos to those dimensions, you could scale them down if necessary, but you will lose some quality.
How are you going to be showing this, on a DVD? Blu-Ray? If on a DVD, after you export your tiff sequence, you will need to re-import that into After Effects, and scale it down to the DVD size (720×576 for PAL I believe), then export that.
I’m not sure if you’re asking if you’re composition needs to be 8-10 feet large, but that would be absolutely ridiculous! You won’t be able to notice your high-def pixels, even projected onto the screen.
In Star Wars Episode three, I believed they cropped the movie’s height down to something below 1,000 pixels, which, when printed onto film it wasn’t noticeable at all.
Hope this helps, I’ll try to answer more if you have more questions,
-Grant
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Thanks for the advice, more questions though, sorry!
Would making the movie 720×576 for the DVD do any stretching/chopping to the movie if the screens are widescreen? Should it be 1024×576 and would the PAR be DV PAL or DV PAL Widescreen?
I know it’d be ridiculous making the comp that big, I meant would the images need to be of a certain res to begin with ie. how large would they need to be processed. Do you mean scale them down in AE or when theyre processed? Also, will I need to make the PAR of the images DV PAL instead of square?
Do you mean import the tiffs as a sequence or as footage and sequence them myself? And if I render as a tiff sequence how is it preferable to making a mov?
Thanks
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No, when you scale it down you will need to make sure that you scale it proportionately. You can just “Fit to Comp Width” (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H) which will scale your footage to the right size, keeping the correct aspect ratio, but you will have black bars on the top and bottom.
At the minimum your images will need to be 1920×1080, so that they are full quality – remember though, when you scale them down you will create some artifacts and will lose some quality.
You want to leave the pixel aspect ratio set to whatever it was when you imported the pictures, don’t mess with that or you will have a squished or stretched image.
Once you have you’re final video done, I think it’s best to render out the final “master,” as a tiff sequence, which is completely lossless (make sure you use LZW Compression though, or the file sizes will be enormous), so that from that, you can re-export all of your different formats – for you the high-def version and the DVD version.
The quality of the tiff sequence is far superior to that of a Quicktime sequence. When you import the the sequence just check the “TIFF sequence” box, and it will show up in the project window as a sequence of sorts.
Hope this helps! If you have any more questions feel free to ask.
-Grant
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So if the images are processed as square pixels (before I get to them) and I make the original comp square pixels, the movie won’t stretch when it’s played on DVD? I was always under the impression I had to make things DV PAL…
But since 1920×1080 is the same aspect ratio as 1024×576, wouldn’t making the DVD 720×576 distort?
So I’ll ask for the images to be processed as tiffs, and making them 1920×1080 should reduce the need to scale them down? Is there any chance I could use 300dpi images?
Will I not be able to make one high-def movie that can be played on both the bigger and smaller screens? Or will having the high-def movie basically scaled down onto smaller screens lose quality?
I was going to sequence the layers in AE to a specific frame rate and was hoping to do some retouching to the finished article in terms of levels, colour, etc, will doing a tiff sequence allow control over these things if they’re exported as separate tiffs? Or will importing back in with ‘tiff sequence’ checked essentially make one piece of footage in AE like you say that can be retouched, resized etc? Probably seems obvious but I need to make sure, I won’t have much time to revisit things that go array!
So to clarify, I make the ‘master’ comp 1920×1080 with the tiffs I import processed to that size and ratio, with pixel size set to that of the images…
After the images have been sequenced I render as a tiff sequence (not forgetting LZW) and re-import the sequence back into AE with ‘tiff sequence’ checked and do my resizing and retouching to the entire ‘movie’ and render out again as a riff sequence… is that about right??
Thanks again
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It would be best to have the images processed with 1.07 non-square pixels to begin with, but it’s not necessary. While you work on your images in After Effects (a non-square comp with the square images) you images will look squished, but they won’t be rendered out that way – you can hit the “Toggle PAR” button to see what the final result will look like.
When you scale the image down to DVD size, since you are just fitting to the Comp Width (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+H), but still keeping the aspect ratio, your images will not be distorted, there will just be black bars on the top and bottom, keeping the 16:9 ratio.
You can start with as many dots per inch as you’d like, the standard is around 300. Just make sure in After Effects you’re working in 16 or even 32 bits per channel to keep that quality.
You could make one high-def version as long as the means you have to play them are high-def. I had the impression one of them was DVD, which can’t display HD content, which is why you would have needed to scale it down to 720×576.
And keep in mind that the tiff sequence is only for your work flow and the video master at the end. Your final formats can’t be tiff, since it doesn’t hold audio.
The size of the screen won’t affect the quality of the video, as long as the screen can play your 1080 footage. You’ll need to export the master twice if the two screens have different resolutions. For example, a non-HDTV can’t play HD content, so the 1080 version won’t work on that TV, which is why you needed to scale down to SD size.
For each different “scene” of your video, I suggest that you make a new composition, at the frame rate you want and retouch them all separately (you can now render out each scene as a separate tiff sequence – make sure you create a file to store them in, or you’ll have a mess of hundreds of tiff images), and when you’re done with them all, just layer all the compositions (or tiff sequences if you rendered out the compositions) together into one final composition that you will then render out as the master.
You’re comp needs to be set to work with whatever PAR the video format will be – so for the master 1080, I believe it will be square, and for the DVD PAL I think it’s 1.07.
It’s very confusing and I don’t think anybody understands everything about it completely.
So, I’ll try to summarize what your workflow will look like: 1) Import your pictures and mess with each scene in its own comp.
2) Add all of these sequences to one final composition.
3) Render that out as a tiff sequence (inside its own folder, of course) with LZW compression.
4) Create the audio track (.wav is good).
5) Re-import that into AE, and create a new comp with the size that you need, for the DVD it will be 720×576, and drag the tiff sequence into the timeline, and hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H to scale the sequence to the WIDTH of the comp, which automatically keeps the correct aspect ratio.
6)Add the audio track to the timeline, making sure things are lined up.
7) Export to the format you are using, whether it’s MPEG-2 or whatever.
8) Burn the format.
9) You’re done!
Wow, I need a sandwich.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have more questions.
-Grant
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Wow, thanks for all that, hope you had a lie down afterwards!
The animation will be shown primarily on a large screen in the foyer of the company it’s for, and on smaller monitors elsewhere in the building, and won’t have any audio.
I do believe that both screen types will be running off DVD and neither is strictly HD – if I discover that the ‘big’ screen is HD what format and means of playback do you suggest? If they are both from DVD what format/codec do you recommend that’ll give the best quality, especially on the bigger screen?
Thanks again.
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First off, do you have the Adobe Production Collection Suite, or whatever it’s named? Because then you will have Dynamic Link, which I believe allows you to just import your master After Effects Composition straight into Encore DVD to burn it.
That would be your best option, since it’s lossless and fast, and then Encore let’s you burn to Blu-ray or DVD.
I would definitely check out the Encore forum on Creative COW for some tips on how to get your footage into Encore effectively if you don’t have the Adobe bundle.
Since you’ll be burning to disc anyway, you might as well convert to MPEG-2 before it gets into Encore (that is if you DON’T have the bundle).
So in the render queue dialogue change the format to MPEG-2, and adjust the settings (there aren’t that many), for most of them you’ll just want to leave them at the highest setting. For the bitrate, obviously the higher the better but it will leave you with huge file sizes, so you’ll have to decide on that one, which is more important, file size or quality?
And remember you’re only exporting as MPEG-2 if you don’t have the Adobe Bundle! If you do just import it using Adobe Dynamic Link!
Hope this helps,
-Grant
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Bad news, we don’t have encore! To be fair video production isn’t what we do where I work (design branding and advertising agency, mainly for print), this is just a one-off, though I’m hoping it’ll be the start of more of this kind of thing.
Do you think it’s worth getting a trial version of Premiere off adobe’s website (am I right in thinking encore comes bundled with premiere?) It’s just that with a very limited timeframe I don’t think this time round I’ll have the time to obtain, and then get to grips with, encore. It shouldn’t look like it when it’s finished but this really is a rush job, typical for the client really (want everything yesterday for tiny budgets)
If I render out an mpeg2 and burn onto dvd with toast titanium (we’re on macs) will I be losing any quality?
Thanks
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