• Adobe After Effects

  Slow Quicktime

  Posted by N. Row on May 5, 2008 at 10:00 pm

  I received a group of 1920×1080 .MOVs exported from FCP to Animation codec.

  They behave extremely slowly. Bog AE down to a crawl and make life generally miserable. I work in HD often and have not had issues (generally I work with TIF sequences but have used Quicktime files as well, and generally render to QT to preserve audio sync, etc.)

  I rendered one clip out of AE7 and it I can scrub it in Player, and almost play it real-time, where the original took 40 seconds to show a single frame change. The render took 3 hours, and the resultant file was perfectly fine, and also a lot smaller!? The original RGB file was 3gb, the chroma-keyed RGBA render was 600mb.

  So I exported the rest of the clips from QT Player Pro (7.3.1) to the same Animation Best Codec, and these files work perfectly. The result files are the same size. Render times dropped from 3 hours to 13 minutes.(!!!)

  The rendering was done with AE7, on XPpro SP2, with QT 7.1. I only updated from 7.1 to 7.3.1 on another machine since I hate changing Quicktime versions if I can avoid it. 7.3.1 seems to be working fine. I have never installed the latest QT. I guess that’s 7.4.5 or somesuch…

  Any ideas on why these files perform so poorly? Has anyone else had an issue like this?

  I’m not sure what version of FCP these came from, or what version of QT they use but I will ask and post back tomorrow.

  Thanks for your info.

  N. Row replied 18 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Todd Morgan

  May 5, 2008 at 10:13 pm

  In many cases your RAM will chew up the QT file as you play with it in AE. The reason why Tiffs work nicely is that they are individual files and load into the cache frame by frame. The QT file loads the entire clip into RAM, so super large QT files will bog you down. I have taken QT files like these, rendered them out to TIFF or TGA uncompressed sequences, then used those as source files, instead of the QT… hope that helps!

  Todd Morgan
  Creative Director
  morgancreative
  http://www.morgancreative.ca
• 

  N. Row

  May 6, 2008 at 2:01 am

  Thank you both for adding to this thread. I’ve read both of your previous contributions on this subject and appreciate your interest.

  I love the efficiency of .tif sequences in terms hardware efficiency. But keeping audio and timebase conformed throughout a workflow from whatever source that sends me stuff, gets old fast. I get files in 30fps, some in 24, others in 23.976, and the rest in 29.97…

  I wish Quicktime were up to the task… It’s been great until now. But now it’s a mess. The whole Apple/Panasonic cartel burns me as well.

  I digress… The footage I’m dealing with was shot XDCam and exported to Animation for me.

  I confirmed the Animation Codec in the .mov files with both AE7 and QT Player Properties and Movie Info, etc. No sign of H.264 or any other AvcHD/MPEG2 type codecs in the file headers.

  Simply exporting from QT Player to the same Animation Best Auto-Keyframe 29.97 codec fixed major issues the files had from FCP export. I will post tomorrow what FCP and QT the files came from. I suspect the latest…

  The idea of an Adobe Player looks great. I would dump Quicktime tomorrow for a world-class wrapper without all these dumb issues QT has. Like 16 track audio splits? Or RLE style multi-channel float…

  Imagine a multilayer float photoshop sequence with scripting? It might not playdown in realtime, but you archive an entire production in one sequence. Hey Adobe, talk to Autodesk and Digital Domain. An industrial standard wrapper with float will relieve a lot of headaches out here!

  I hope I live long enough to see that!
• 

  Kevin Camp

  May 6, 2008 at 2:53 am

  i wonder if they had temporal compression on for the losseless animation codec… i think apple calls it temporal keyframes, or something like that. i could se that giving ae and you hard drive fits trying to composite a large, run-length compressed frame from multiple large, run-length compressed frames.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  N. Row

  May 6, 2008 at 7:47 pm

  I have a little more info. They are using FCP 6.03 and the latest Quicktime 7.4.5.

  They exported XDcam from their time-line using Quicktime Conversion Utility. Apparently they are cutting in XDCam EX. Not advisable to cut with GOP video…

  I can only think the latest QT package is causing some issues.

  Thanks for the input.

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