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After Effects Rendering
So I’m going to be shooting a movie in about a week and I’ve been preping for everything there is to prep for. The movie is going to be about 20 minutes long, with some special effects. But when I say special effects there is literally going to be one special effects shot, and the rest of the effects will be just color correction and things like that. My problem is that I’ll be shooting in 1080i on an HD sony camcorder, and now that I have Sony Vegas Pro I can edit my footage in HD.
Here in lies the problem, I don’t know how to maintain the high quality of this footage when I render out of Adobe After Effects. So everything will be in HD, except when I add the effects in After Effects I don’t know how to render it out so that the quality is the same as it came in as. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated because I want this movie to turn out as good as possible. Thanks in advance.
P.S. I’m using Adobe After Effects 7, but if it’s really necessary I will purchase Adobe After Effects CS3 in order to do this.
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8 Replies
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It is not necessary to upgrade to CS3.
When you render out, use the render queue and not the export command. They are not the same thing. Once in the render queue, choose an codec such as quicktime animation which is lossless. Be warned that the output video will be immense – seriously immense – but the quality will be A1. Assuming you’re outputting to Blu-Ray, Encore CS3 will transcode the video for you so that it will fit on a regular disc.
To find out more about rendering, see the basic tutorials at videocopilot.net
Simon Bonner
youtube.com/simonsaysFX -
If your going to import the rendered video into Vegas, I would not use quicktime but use the uncompressed AVI which will also be a huge file. If you have the Canopus HD codec or the Cineform codec, these will do very well in Vegas and will be considerably smaller in file size. Danny Hays
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I regularly output to Quicktime and/or uncompressed AVI and can confirm that the files are massive. A 3 minute shot with basic colour correction and some cuts ended up at about 14 gig in QT and about 4.5 gig in AVI. I didn’t realise that the export and render queue were different though so that’s certainly something that’ll come in handy. I’ve noticed that the Cineform codec seem to be of a lesser quality than the uncompressed files although I don’t know enough about it to fully comment.
If you’re exporting from Vegas as HD it will take AGES to export (I run a pretty fast quad-core and ten minutes of video took almost an hour to export without ANY effects or transitions to use in AE) but I can confirm that it maintains the quality. An idea might be to use Vegas for your colour corrections etc and export only the one segment of film that requires special effects then re-import that part into Vegas with the rest of the movie. I don’t know if it’ll be of any use to you but hopefully it could save you some time!
Good luck with it!
TommyHype Napungra
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thanks to everyone who’s posted so far. I’ve been editing some other footage (heavy on the effects) and I used the render que. I rendered the file out as a quicktime file. then when I went to open it, it opens, but when I go to hit play my computer froze then shut down.
any ideas why this is? is it my computer? or quicktime?
aside from quicktime what would be the best quality format that I should render it out as?
also, I’ve had this problem before and the only thing that I could do was lower the resolution from full to half when I used to export them. It always plays at half res, but at full it always freezes. just thought that might help someone figure out the problem
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hmmmmm, i was checking the render que for other formats to see if they work and I couldn’t find avi. i know that I can export as an avi but it’s not here in the render que. is avi short for something?
i checked half resolution and it’s just aweful. it totally makes my project look like D work, when at full res it’s A quality. so if anyone knows how i could render out at full res and be able to watch the file that’d be great. thanks guys, please help 🙁
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oh okay never mind. i feel like an idiot. avi is video for windows like i thought. probably should have checked before i posted. anyways still i would like to know why my full res quicktimes always freeze on me. answers/solutions?
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Uncompressed in avi or mov won’t play with media player and quicktime without stuttering or stopping on any computer I’ve used. These formats are importing into an NLE without loss of quality. There are other quicktime formats you can render to that should play on your computer fine. Experiment with some if the mid grade quality settings and work from there. Dany Hays
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Uncompressed QT, or AVI, are virtually impossible to play unless you have a nasa supercomputer. They are intermediate renders, designed to prevent you losing quality when you do further work on them. If you’re rendering a final file to view, you probably don’t want it to be massive anyway: try divx or mpeg. Or QT photo jpeg at 90% looks as uncompressed as it gets, but should be playable.
If youre doing further work on your render and have the drive space, lossless codecs are the way forward.
Simon Bonner
youtube.com/simonsaysFX
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