After Effects for HD Televison Avid Deko and Thunder

[Rae Maupin]

Dave, thanks for the reply. We have successfully rendered the animations in After Effects using the QuickTime Full animation codec with 16 bit audio track per Avid’s specifications. The Thunder and Deko will not accept import to convert to .MXF.

Avid still holds that this is the best Codec to use. Looking for real world HD daily produciton thoughts.

Rae Maupin Creative Design Director NBC12

[Steve Roberts]

Hm. In my experience, Animation is requested by Avid editors when they think you don’t have Avid codecs on your system. However, it’s possible for the After Effects artist to download Avid codecs and render directly to them, thus avoiding Avid’s conversion of the Animation files, and making the Avid editor your new best friend. And the Avid codec files would be smaller than Animation files.

Next time, I’d ask the editor if s/he’d prefer files compressed to something other than Animation, possiblt a specific Avid codec at a specific quality (say, Meridien 2:1).

[Deleted User]

I use the Quicktime animation codec for files being sent to our Deko Thunder. A 30sec anim is typically between 500 to 800mb. I believe that the Deko needs to transcode the quicktimes into its own format. I haven’t had any problems yet.

Lee
CTV Calgary

[Rae Maupin]

Lee,
Are you doing 16bit or 8bit color in your HD After Effects file.

Rae Maupin Creative Design Director NBC12

[Deleted User]

oops….missed the HD part. These are 8bit SD files. We still have a few years to go before the HD mandate in Canada.

Lee
CTV Calgary

[Kevin Camp]

we render for our dekos (older sd boxes) straight from ae. the dekos are very picky and take only one media file type, dv, and the audio (even if there is no audio) needs to be at a rate of 48000 or it won’t accept them. and the dv file has to be ‘exported’ as dv stream, it won’t take a qt wrapped dv file….

now, these are older boxes from pinnacle, but i would think that the newer avid dekos may be just as picky. do you have any way to verify the file types that your dekos will accept? i’m thinking that maybe avid’s dnxhd codec may work. it’s a free download from avid for mac or pc, here. but what ever the deko can read, you can probably render (or maybe export) straight from ae.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Gary Hazen]

It works. At least it works for us. We recently upgraded to Deko 3000’s and revamped our show design which put the new Deko’s through quite a workout. We imported dozens of these files into the Deko without issue. A lot of these files were over 2 gigs.

FWIW, here’s our render settings:
QT Animation
RGB + Alpha
1920 x 1080
field rendered (upper field first)
29.97
audio (sorry I don’t remember the audio settings)

I’m no expert on Deko but here are a few things to consider. Make sure that the Deko is configured for HD. My understanding is that the 3000 can be configured HD or SD. But it’s not a hybrid, it can’t do both at the same time. Our engineer set up the config so I can’t help you there. The other strange thing I noticed about the way Deko behaves is that it places the converted MXF files in the same folder as the QT source files. If your source files are on CD or DVD I can see this potentially crashing the system. Our work flow entailed moving the files to the D drive on Deko before importing. Anyway, a little food for thought regarding the Deko. With regards to the Thunder I don’t know, ours is an older SD model.

I’m hoping that a future Deko upgrade includes support for Avid’s DNxHD codec. QT Animation is a workhorse but it’s a heavy file.

Good luck and chime back in if you still need some help.

– GH

[Harold Pilote]

The other solution is to use a video server made to play qt file natively: CLASS-BUG HD