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Artifacts on Red Channel
Hello,
Ran into a problem on a recent edit. It was a simple DV edit with some titles done in After Effects. Sequence preset in FCP was DV NTSC and using Blackmagic NTSC 8bit to monitor out of my BM card. I rendered out title in AE with animation codec RGB with alpha. Import into FCP, render, and all of the red in the title lookds very artifacty and blocky. Rest of the image is fine, it is only in the reds.
Check the AE render in QT player, looks fine, something is happening when FCP renders out the animation codec. I changed the render settings to render in high precision YUV. Looks a little better, but far from usable.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
-Bryan
Impact Productions
Santa Cruz, CA -
9 Replies
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how did you export it from a.e. as an animaton, or did you try and save time and export as matching footage so you wouldn’t have to re render in finalcut. theres a debat some way down in the a.e. forum about quality when exporting and re rendering vs exporting and dropping straight in. render out as an animation or high quality q-time, and re render in a.e.
hope this helps
-zander
Aaron Zander-Student edditor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2 -
[Bryan Rawles] “Import into FCP, render, and all of the red in the title lookds very artifacty and blocky. Rest of the image is fine, it is only in the reds.”
Sounds like your reds are too hot. Check your red levels on the scopes prior to rendering. You probably need to pull down the red levels in AE.
Also, in After Effects, just render to the DV codec if you’re finishing to DV. It’s a waste of time to render in animation and then have FCP re-render the thing down to DV. You’ll get a cleaner end product letting After Effects create the DV file.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[walter biscardi] “Also, in After Effects, just render to the DV codec if you’re finishing to DV. It’s a waste of time to render in animation and then have FCP re-render the thing down to DV. You’ll get a cleaner end product letting After Effects create the DV file.”
there’s the response, many of us who use both alot, have been noticing this, so people are trying many differnt things, these are our findings, it seems to be a little more partial per person.
heres a cool tutorial for color correcting in a.e.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/broadcast_safe/index.htmlhope this helps and gets you where your going
Aaron Zander-Student edditor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2 -
Thanks for the responses.
Walter – Your suggestion that the levels may have been to hot or that I was over saturated was my initial thought as well, and I did test on an external scope and everything was legal. One thought that I had was that because there have been some gama shift issues in going between FCP and AE, that upon importing into FCP, that would boost my levels beyond legal values.
I could not export a DV file because I needed the alpha channel, if I don’t need an alpha channel, than I always go with a DV export. And I do agree that you get a much better result when you export DV out of AE, but what if you need an alpha channel? Do you have an other codec recommendations besides animation?
What I ended up doing was using Automatic Duck out of FCP into AE and add my titles to my footage in AE, and then exporting a DV file. But that was much more time consuming, as opposed to just laying down the animation where I needed it in my timeline.
Anyways, I appreciate the input.
Thanks,
-Bryan
Impact Productions
Santa Cruz, CA -
well im glad you figured it out, automatic duck is amazing app/plug in, i wish i could aford it
Aaron Zander-Student edditor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2 -
[Bryan Rawles] “I could not export a DV file because I needed the alpha channel, if I don’t need an alpha channel, than I always go with a DV export. And I do agree that you get a much better result when you export DV out of AE, but what if you need an alpha channel? Do you have an other codec recommendations besides animation?”
Just create a matte. Duplicate your Sequence in AE, precompose all layers, apply the brightness filter and make it so all your elements turn white. Then use the Travel Matte – Luma in FCP to spply the matte.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[Zander] “https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?univpostid=874476&forumid=2&postid=874527&pview=t
there’s the response, many of us who use both alot, have been noticing this, so people are trying many differnt things, these are our findings, it seems to be a little more partial per person.”
I’ve been using AE for about 10 years now and no matter what codec / frame size, I’ve always found that the renders are cleaner and sharper if they are rendered in the native codec of NLE / Frame Size / Frame rate being used. If you render in Animation and then have your NLE re-render the piece, there is generally a softness added to the animation.
The biggest key is to render in the correct frame size / frame order. Each to his own, but I’ve never seen any quality improvement from DV to uncompressed 1080i HD rendering in the Animation codec first in After Effects.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[Bryan Rawles] “One thought that I had was that because there have been some gama shift issues in going between FCP and AE, that upon importing into FCP, that would boost my levels beyond legal values.”
That’s a very minimal shift and would not affect your levels that much or push them to “illegal.”
Red is just an ugly color in Standard Definition and especially in the DV codec. You have to be really careful with the amount of red you use in your image. I generally work with blues and greens for my graphic palette whenever using the DV codec and reserve red for uncompressed SD (sparingly) or HD.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Thanks for the luma matte tip, I’ll give it shot.
-Bryan
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