-
After Effects render out to Avid
Hi,
I shot video on XDCAM EX, 24 frames, 1080p. I edited the footage in Media Composer 3.5. I did a QT ref. output and used AE CS4 for color correction etc. I degrained, CC’ed, motion blurred. Now, my issue is this; When i render the file, it takes 11 hours, then leaves me with a 19 gig Avid DNxHD file. I can deal with the time to render, but the file size seems way too big. My natives files are not even that big with all 50 minutes of footage combined. Any suggestions on what wrapper i should use to render out with?
I have an intel quad core 2.6ghz processor and 4g of ram on windows XP pro.
Thanks.
Marc
-
4 Replies
-
The file size shouldn’t alarm you. Quality requires disk space.
XDCAM EX is intended for acquisition only; the files are heavily compressed, in a 4:2:0 color space. Avid DNxHD is relatively lightly compressed, and in a 4:2:2 color space. DNxHD is far better suited for mastering than XDCAM EX is.
What do you need to do with the file next? Play out to tape? Make Blu-rays? DVDs? Web video?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Every HD file I have ever rendered has been HUGE… IF I wanted to keep the quality level high.
The concern I always had was the time it took to render… for significant increase in rendering speed, I always make sure that OpenGL is turned on (…except with Movie Looks Plug-in – OpenGL and Looks doesn’t play well together with Nvidia cards).
Avid is pretty good about accepting just about any video codec… so the choice of compression video file formats are numerous but all have some sort of degradation involved (specially if you want smaller sized files). How much size reduction and quality reduction you are willing to accept depends upon what you are going to do with the final output.
-
Just a quick correction to my previous post: 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 refer to chroma subsampling, not color spaces.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Thanks guys,
OK, at least its normal. I was sure 18 gigs for 4 minutes was insane. I needed to output to youtube. i just rendered out to 720p and a lower DNxHD bit codec. i got it to only 2 gig. And joe, thatnks for mentioning Open GL and Looks not playing nice. I was wondering what all that was about in AE. I kept getting errors.
Both of you guys have been a great help. Creative Cow is great!
Marc
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up