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Footage Quality – Too good? Basic question.
Hi all
Having a small problem with some footage in AE. I have some footage which i have brought into AE as huffyuv. My copy of AE wont play or scrub through it very quickly tho, in fact its so slow its unusable, as i need to do some editing. Am i having this problem because there is too much information for my computer/AE to process? Should i bring it in as a smaller file type? Something lossy? My eventual output is for web, could somebody recommend a file type i could use? If i use a compressed file, will this problem get better or worse?Thanks all.
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6 Replies
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Unlike an NLE, AE has to render everything. You shouldn’t be able to scrub through footage on AE unless it has been rendered, where you see a green bar in the timeline. Do a RAM preview, then scrub through the footage.
Or is there another problem?
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Cheers Steve
I see the error of my ways now, and im using Premier for this instead.A general question about footage formats tho…
Will Premier/After Effects cope better with an uncompressed file format such as huffyuv or with a compressed file type such as an avi? Does the all the uncompressed info with huffyuv slow it down? Or would having to decompress on the fly with an avi slow it down more?
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I’ve found that decompressing isn’t a big deal with today’s processors.
If a video has a data rate that is too high for your hard drive to play back smoothly, it will play back in a jerky manner or drop frames … in an NLE. This (fast disc access) is not as crucial with AE, since it has to render everything. NLEs have to read from disc quickly, so to get scrubbing or smooth playback, you need to lower the data rate of the clips/sequences/timelines or get faster Hard Drives or a RAID.
My recent MacPro OEM drives will play back “8-bit uncompressed” as well as Photo-JPEG, KONA, and flavours of DV, of course. Huffy might be fine on your system, but for sure, you won’t be able to play back uncomressed (“none”) AVIs without a RAID system.
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Cheers guys
Im basically editing footage for youtube, so the quality isnt an issue as such.
I was initially trying to edit in AE, but was having difficulty scrubbing through. I had to do some wipes etc at specific points. So, ditching AE i tried in Premier which is obviously more adept at the task of editing, but my machine still had some trouble playing the files smoothly in the preview window. Ram previews are ok, but for the quick back and forth scrub over certain spots its not so good. I thought my problem might have been using uncompressed files, but it was also suggested to me that using a compressed file might cause just as much trouble as i would have to uncompress it as it was read.
Thanks again!
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[Ian Collister] “…but it was also suggested to me that using a compressed file might cause just as much trouble as i would have to uncompress it as it was read.”
In general, that’s untrue. These codecs have a decent data rate for editing, from what I’ve seen & heard:
DV 25/50/100 (MiniDV, DVCPRO50, DVCPROHD)
Photo-JPEG (try 89-90% quality)
Motion-JPEG A/B (not MPEG)
Hardware codecs (Decklink, Matrox, Kona, Avid, etc.)
Uncompressed 8-bit
Apple Intermediate Codec (never used it)
Apple ProRes (its AE issues might be fixed)There may be others.
By the way, don’t edit in AE. It’s a royal pain.
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Have you tried creating a proxy for your footage file?
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