After Effects Rendering Glitch?

[Brij Nandan]

Hello sir,
I am a student of multimedia in India.
I probably use raw footage(avi-mpeg2) in after effects cs3 and i have also faced this glitching problem. But i have not any problem with quicktime movies.
so i want to know which formats are good to import in after effects?

Well, i used to render my output in avi(xvid mpeg4) format and i found that this is highly compressed and good quality format.
Is this compression good for output for general purpose?

[Walter Soyka]

To expand on Dave’s response, not only do you want to avoid using AE for final compression, you should also avoid using compressed media (such as your Xvid AVIs) for subsequent compressions (like MPEG2 for DVD, H264 for web, etc.).

It’s really best to start with a lossless render and handle all your subsequent compression jobs from that original.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Andrew Brown]

Replying to an ancient post in case somebody else finds this useful;

I was haunted by the same problem, in ever-increasing degrees, for a long time. Render glitches persisted, irregardless of the source material for the projects; different video footage, generated purely in AE, etc. People more knowledgeable than me suggested the following, which I did:

Render to a hard drive, not an external drive
Make sure there is ample space on that hard drive
Set AE to clear the cache every set number of frames during renders
Check your OpenGL settings
Etc., etc.

Nothing worked. The thing that finally solved the problem was switching from rendering .MOV files in animation codec, to rendering .MOV files in PNG codec. Hundreds of renders later, and glitch-free.