AE to PPro to AVI

[Peter Berthet]

avi is typically compressed

compression = loss of image quality

if you want to maintain a high quality export from AE then ensure that you send it out as 10bit uncompressed DV (i assume thats what your working in)

alternatively export the pieces of footage that your applying titles to from PPRO into AE (uncompressed), add your effects and then relink the clips back into PPRO

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Ashley M. kirchner]

I don’t know if it matters really. All I’m doing with the final footage is encoding it back to DVD … mpeg = loss of quality again.

However, the difference is that if I take the AE generated AVI straight into Encore and spit a DVD out, the footage is clean, crisp. But if I take it into PPro first (which I have to do to insert, add, or overlay it into the video footage already captured), it comes out looking horrible.

Some projects can get away with your suggestion of relinking, but most of my projects, the AE parts are inserted in between the video footage, or at the beginning or end.

I suppose another option is to pull the captured video into AE and render everything out that way and go directly into Encore.

[Vince Becquiot]

For exports between apps, use Quicktime animation 100%. That’s lossless, and the size is a bit smaller than uncompressed AVI.

Compression does matter, you want to keep it from getting compressed until your final export to DVD.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Peter Berthet]

yeah it sounds like what your doing is double rendering things, which always kills quality

as vince said, quicktime animation is great if you can get away with it, especially if your dropping things into a PPRO timeline

“However, the difference is that if I take the AE generated AVI straight into Encore and spit a DVD out, the footage is clean, crisp. But if I take it into PPro first (which I have to do to insert, add, or overlay it into the video footage already captured), it comes out looking horrible. ”

as far as what your saying there is that,

AE spits out an avi (one render)
that clip then comes into PPRO and gets exported out to dvd (2nd render)

if your doing that sort of thing its fine workflow wise, but check your export settings, assuming your working (for examples sake)
DV PAL 25fps standard def stuff
then your export from AE would be either

DV PAL 10bit uncompressed 720×576
or
QT Animation 720×576

either of those will preserve the maximum image quality without compression, so when you bring them into PPRO theyre not going to lose any quality when you do your final export

from the sounds of it your just double handling the clips, hence the quality loss

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Ashley M. kirchner]

Hrm, I’d have to try that. The only reason this came up was because I like to “preview” my AVIs throughout the project. So I tend to render bits and pieces out every so often and view them in WMP before I get to the final render. But I can do the same thing with QT files, so that’s fine.

So here’s another, related question. What if I have to finish with an AVI file, instead of a DVD? Stuff I make for the school district generally have to remain as an AVI on a data DVD. If the export out of PPro is going to muck with the AE (imported) file, I’m screwed.

[Jeff Brown]

Hi Ashley,
My suggestion:
You should work as uncompressed as possible throughout the entire process. You may be capturing in DV, that’s fine. But after the capture, your AE<-->PPro work should be one of the following:
AVI uncompressed
QTime animation codec (100% quality)
QTime PNG codec (100% quality)
File sequence (TGA, PNG, TIF; not JPG)

Your final master output should also be one of the above. You then encode your master to whatever you need: AVI, Flash, tiny QTime, WMV. You then always have a master of the highest quality to go back to in the future.

Yes, this will take lots more HD space. But these days, HD space is a lot cheaper than your time.

-Jeff

[Alex Udell]

Hi…

Another thing to check is your field dominance on your output settings coming out of AE…

It’s very likely that it needs to be set to upper or lower to key over your footage cleanly in PPro…

Do some short tests to figure our the right settings…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv

[Alan Lloyd]

Can you export your AE project (not a render from the project) and bring that project into your PPro project? (I know CS3 does that.) That way, you’re only doing a render at the end.

I can’t tell from your original post if this was something you’d tried. Might be worth a shot.

[Peter Berthet]

the best way would be to stay uncompressed for your entire workflow and only render out and compress the video at the end for your client

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[David Dobson]

If you put the AE generated AVI on your DV PPro timeline, does it show that it’s un-rendered (red line?) If yes then the AE export settings are wrong.

Generally, if you are creating overlay titles, don’t use any compression (QT Animation or None with Alpha)’ but if it’s a full screen piece of video, then the AVI export should work. Just got be sure you’ve got the right settings in AE.