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Hitchy playback in QT renders
Hi All,
Did some searches and couldn’t find anything, so hope this isn’t a repost. I’m on AE CS3 and experienced something again today that has me flummoxed. When I render out my motion graphic (in this case a one minute piece panning and spinning around some photos), I’m seeing little hitches or slight jumps in the playback -it’s not constant, but intermittent, but always in the same areas/times when it happens. I usually render out PhotoJpeg at 100%.
When I ram preview these in AE, they are fine. The whole project frame rate was build and created at 30fps and output to QT as such. I’m on an 8 core MacPro with 8GB of RAM. I went in and double checked the keyframe graph and the movement is all linear, and perfect.
I can’t think of what else could cause this, but when clients need QT movies for the web, or presentation, this always seems to happen.
Thanks for any advice!
~Chris -
6 Replies
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PS – linear keyframes with motion blur added to make it look like the camera is whipping between focal points.
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Thanks for your reply David. I had similar thoughts, but when I compressed the file in Compressor to H.264 (using both Animation and PhotoJpeg as the source), I’m still seeing these little hitches (same places, same spots).
You raise another issue which is when clients are requesting QT pieces to integrate into PowerPoint, and QT for projector presentations, how are people delivering high quality sources? I’ve been using PhotoJpeg, with H.264 versions as a back-up (circumventing the gamma issue with the internal QT settings using the blend/straight alpha technique).
In this particular case, I wonder if it has something to do with the inordinate size of the source PSDs used? I created two that were very large. The first is a long strip of photos made to look like a contact sheet that the camera zips along back and forth across stopping on certain images.
Thanks again for any thoughts/replies.
Cheers,
~Chris -
Thanks again David 🙂
In this case it was 1280×720. I think the thin wide PSD might have been 2500 pixels wide. I know AE doesn’t like working with oversize sources. Maybe I should have stitched it together in AE and pre-composed? Anyway, it looked/worked fine, except for this output issue, which is likely what you’re describing.
Only last thing is that it still showed up in the H.264, but I encoded at the highest quality settings, with all keyframes, etc. Still, all these motion graphic companies seem to be able to compress high quality samples of their work on their websites, at small file sizes, so maybe I just need to figure out a better encoding solution?
All the best,
~Chris -
If your issue is what I’m thinking of, then I’d like to share that we have come across the same problem. I have a few questions, though.
When you export, are you exporting in progressive frames or interlaced? It’s funny, you aren’t the only person who has come across this issue. The few other colleagues in this field we have discussed this with, have lended little to no help.
Also, just fyi, compressing to Windows Media will give you much smaller file sizes [still keeping good, relative quality] rather than using Quicktime compression schemes. The H.264 codec is great, but .WMV files work better with powerpoint presentations and other situations of that sort.
KennethGreen.net
Redefining Fine Art to Fine Wine. -
Thanks for the reply Ken.
I’m creating/exporting progressive frames as this is a standalone motion graphic. Being Mac/Final Cut Studio based, I’ve haven’t tried WMV much. I downloaded the trial for Flip 4 Mac and used the highest settings, but the results were awful.
Ken Stone has some great compression/encoding articles on his website. Aaron’s disc looks great, and Brian Geary (sp?) has some great books/dvds out on this as well. I’ve used the articles on Ken’s site to improve H.264, as well as the gamma workaround mentioned earlier.
Anyway, would love to get more insight to this issue if possible. Is Mark Christiansen on this forum? 😉
Cheers,
~Chris -
My last post brought Mark to mind, so I sent him an email about this. I’ll be sure to post any insight should I hear back from him.
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