After restart, all renders are blurred/soft

[David Bogie]

Could be two things:
You have changed your monitor or preview resolution ()never used premiere, no clue how that could be done).
Your AE renders were higher rez than your Premiere sequence.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Phillip Roh]

My preview resolution is full, monitor resolution is correct. The quality difference is noticeable on my broadcast monitor as I watch the cut between the old/nice export and the new/ugly export.

Even when I place the clips side by side in Premiere and don’t render, there’s a noticeable softness in the new AFX files.

[Darby Edelen]

Were they rendered to the same codec?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Phillip Roh]

Yup! I just did some re-renders to test some stuff.

1) Copy/paste of previously ‘good’ render queue item, whereas the render led to a file in proper quality. I adjusted the ins/outs to be a shorter length, the render created a bad quality file.
2) Sent a specific section of my timeline to the render queue using exact same render preset. Created a bad quality render file.
3) Sent the entire timeline to the render queue. The render failed @ ~25% in due to the typical RAM errors. But the resulting file was *good* in quality, exactly like my initial outputted file.

Case #3 jogged my memory, and I remember that my initial output also had crapped out, but it failed @ ~70%.

[Darby Edelen]

From that post it sounds like all you’re changing is the duration of the workspace and you’re ending up with different quality renders? That shouldn’t be the case.

What codec are you rendering to?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Phillip Roh]

Ya exactly, makes no sense to me :S. Unless for whatever reason, AFX renders ‘differently’ if starting from certain points?

For Render Settings i’m using ‘DV Settings’. For Output Module i’m using ‘Lossless’.

[Darby Edelen]

[Phillip Roh] “For Render Settings i’m using ‘DV Settings’. For Output Module i’m using ‘Lossless’.”

That sounds fine, although DV Settings will render out interlaced I assume this is what you want. When you bring interlaced material into AE it will have its fields separated which will result in edges looking slightly blocky or blurry when viewed in the comp preview, but that’s only for preview purposes and it sounds like that’s not what you’re describing.

Have you viewed the rendered file in QT Player?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Phillip Roh]

Yes, me like interlaced footage :D. Everything inside AE looks beautiful, anytime I export the ‘entire timeline’ it’s beautiful (except for always failing somepoint during render).

I’m on a PC, exporting AVI’s. The quality is noticeable within Windows Media Player (the good clips are crisp, the bad clips are soft/blurry/rough). Likewise within Premiere Pro.

[Darby Edelen]

[Phillip Roh] “anytime I export the ‘entire timeline’ it’s beautiful (except for always failing somepoint during render). “

Well, maybe I can at least help you with that problem. Is your Maximum RAM Cache Size set to 60% or less in your Memory & Cache settings? Do you have Prevent DLL Fragmentation enabled? Is your Maximum Memory usage set to 120%?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Phillip Roh]

Haha, those settings have always confused me. I read alot of conflicting recommendations for those settings :S. My Max RAM Cache is 60%, that’s universally agreed upon. But Max Memory Usage at 120%? How can it be above 100%? How could I use more RAM than I have?

I have DLL turned off (as i’ve read elsewhere…). Should I turn it on?