ae render to 1bit color depth?

[Steve Roberts]

Why 1-bit?
Why not render black & white, but to a common 8-bit codec?
What is your delivery medium?
Where is the AE-rendered video going? Which app, what kind of playback?

[Joie Puckett]

Thanks for the reply, Steve.

The ae render will end up in a flash presentation via flv. We are talking about pixels being represented on the lcd screen. I don’t need anti-aliasing and/ or 8 bit color-depth creating soft edges on the pixels. I need the pixels represented by an “on or off”, 1-bit, with no greys anywhere.

How I present this, or where it goes shouldn’t really matter, can AE render to a low color depth such as 1bit or not ( see the options greyed out to do so, but maybe I need to go back through all the codecs to see which one unlocks the low color depths?

thanks,
Joie

[Martin Vilcans]

If you just want the one-bit effect and it’s not important to save space by exporting using a 1-bit codec (if there is such a codec), just use the Threshold effect. That will give a very simple one-bit image. To add dithering so it looks more realistic, put a Noise effect before Threshold.

Martin Vilcans
Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.librador.com

[Scott Roberts]

Threshold, that’s what I was going to suggest.

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[Joie Puckett]

Thanks for the tip, Martin.

-Joie

[Steve Roberts]

That was a good tip from Martin.

Joie, my reply was to dissuade you from the assumption that rendering to a 1-bit codec was the only answer, when applying the threshold effect and rendering to a regular 8-bit codec is a better solution. I asked where the file was going in order to determine if a 1-bit codec was necessary. Actually, in advanced AE circles, it’s always helpful to know where the file is going afterwards to make sure we’ve picked the right solution. For example, if you were going to an Avid system, you’d probably have to go to an 8-bit codec at some point anyway.

We’ve seen quite a few posts where the question relates to an assumed solution, in this case, rendering to a 1-bit codec when it is not necessary. It would be like asking “how can I build a car?” when all you want to do is go to a meeting across town. We would suggest taking the bus, since it’s cheaper and faster.

Anyway, threshold should give you the look you want, maybe with levels applied (beforehand) to tweak things.

[Joie Puckett]

Thanks again Steve.

I guess I still don’t technically have an answer to the question on how to render to low color depth with AE…

-Joie

[Steve Roberts]

Render to a BMP sequence, set to 1-bit (black and white).

[Joie Puckett]

That looks like it could work… I will try it when I get back on that pc. thanks.

-Joie

[Martin Vilcans]

Since you’re going to use the FLV format eventually, you could try exporting to that. As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia article on FLV, it supports lower colour depths, but I haven’t checked if it supports one bit.

You’ll probably need to be aware difference between one bit per channel (3 bits in total, giving 8 possible colours) and one bit (monochrome).

Martin Vilcans
Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.librador.com