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Crazy file size!?
Hey,
I have a question about how AE renders. I have a 20GB AVI file and I just put some titles on it (about 20 layers or so). The render took forever and the resulting file was 160GB!! Is that normal? It seems freakin ridiculous that just text would increase the file size like that. It’s pretty confusing. I then decided to render the titles separately as a .MOV with alpha – It was 2GB. Then I put that into Premiere with the original AVI and rendered that out. I ended up with a more reasonable 20GB file. What is up with AE?
Now I want to put some adjustment layers on that for colour corrections etc and render that out, but the renderer reckons it’s gonna take 51 hours to render. That probably means a 200+GB file…
Can anyone explain to me what the hell AE does to increase the file size so much, or what I am doing wrong? How would a 200GB .MOV be written to DVD in Encore anyway?Any help would be awesome!
Thanks so much!Shane
The farsighted see better things!
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5 Replies
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What codec did you render out to? If it’s an uncompressed AVI, then yes, that could very conceivably happen.
After Effects isn’t doing anything “wrong”, it’s doing exactly what you asked it to do: export my movie without any compression in an AVI wrapper. Just as it did when you exported your second movie: export my movie in (I guess) the Animation codec in a Quicktime wrapper.
Have a quick read of the manual, specifically the bit that’s about choosing about output formats and settings.
In answer to your final question, a 200GB movie would have to be compressed to MPEG2 to go on a DVD-video. So that’s how that’s done :o)
All the best,
BenCurious Turtle Professional Video
Training | Editing |Support -
Thanks so much Ben,
The project is a long one – 90mins, and I wouldn’t ordinarily render that using AE, but the effect I want to achieve isn’t really possible with Premiere unfortunately.
It’s just confusing to me that if I render the 20GB (which was captured from DV, edited in Premiere and rendered out as an uncompressed AVI) together with the 2GB .MOV titles with alpha in Premiere, as an uncompressed file I get a 20GB file, but if I do the exact same thing with AE I get a 160GB file. I rendered to Quicktime in AE and Premiere with the DV-PAL setting at best quality. I don’t really know what AE does to increase the file size nearly 10 times.
I know they are two different tools for different functions, but that seems pretty extreme. I guess I’m so shocked because I’ve never tried rendering such a long project in AE.
Anyway, I will try rendering out a compressed file. I just thought that would reduce the footage quality, which I wanted to avoid. Any tips on the best route to go to minimize loss of quality?
I’ll be authoring to DVD using Encore CS3.Thanks again
ShaneThe farsighted see better things!
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What you’re looking for is mathematically lossless but smaller file size. This is where math compression comes in. 3 of the best are (8 bit run length encoding) animation, (8 bit wavelet) jpeg2000, and Tiff (lzw off). Now if you change histograms a lot, then use a 10 bit encoder to minimize the chance of posterations (gradients of missing color usually from heavy redundant color correction) And if you do have sky gradients of color, working in a 16 bpc workspace will reduce precision errors.
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The PhotoJPEG codec can’t do lossless – even at 100% quality it is a lossy codec. At 100% quality only it is a 4:4:4 codec and at 99% and below it is a 4:2:2 codec.
PhotoJPEG at 100% is 4:4:4 lossy
PhotoJPEG at 99% and below is 4:2:2 lossy
Jpeg2000 at 100% is lossless (but uses lots of CPU power)
Animation at 100% is lossless 8 bitPNG is lossless too btw, but in the quicktime container it handles only 8bpc too.
PNG at 16bpc can be good for images sequences.I compared TGA, PNG, and TIff to PSD and only Tiff(lzw off) at 3200% was flawless in comparison in RGB color picker values.
TGA, PNG, and Tiff (only with LZW compression on) seem to have strange micro pixel color changes at 3200%. I’m guessing LZW has coding precision rounding errors in the area of a millionth of a rgb value.
PSD and Tiff(LZW off) are perfectly lossless but since Tiff is half the size, that’s what I use.
I would love to hear other people’s roundups of video codecs.
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Thanks Dave and Chris,
All valuable info. Some of which I’ll still have to read over a few more times to really understand… I will try some renders today and see what I get. I’m sure I’ll at least learn something.
Shane
The farsighted see better things!
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