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Avid > After Effects > DVD Workflow
Hello
I’m having trouble achieving good results with this workflow. I’m exporting my 3 minute PAL sequence from Avid as a quicktime reference into After Effects. After applying Magic Bullet (and waiting 8 hours for the render!) I then export an uncompressed Quicktime and then using either Sorenson Squeeze or Procoder 3 (and using the reccomended settings in both), compressing to an MPEG2 and then finally burning the DVD in Avid DVD. The results really are not great, nothing to the quality I originally have in my Avid. At what point am I making an error, or could anyone let me know of a better workflow. Apologies if this is too vague, let me know if I should clarify anything
Thanks in advance -
2 Replies
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My first thought is that you really don’t need to send the file to AfterEffects…you need to look at the help menu or Avid DVD manual and follow the steps involving metatracks and exporting the video directly into sorenson squeeze
Avid Editor
New York City -
Hey Carl,
I don’t know if you are still working on this project, but I have had similar problems trying to figure out an effective workflow. Although you’re working in Avid, http://www.kenstone.net has got loads of great articles, some of which are all about incorporating Magic Bullet into your workflow.
Firstly, which Magic Bullet filter are you applying? Are you applying it to SD footage? I presume that with those render times you are using the deinterlace filter, with deartifacting and maybe a look suite or something.. It’s important that your footage is correctly interpreted – ie, separate fields is set to off. Also when you render, render fields should be set to off if you are going progressive. Which I assume you are.. I tried exporting at full PAL quality a few times and found that the exported file was pretty soft. So now I always use the animation codec even though I end up with enormous files..
If you export uncompressed from AE then your footage should still be looking pretty good and crisp at that point. I always do my mpeg-2 encoding in either DVD Studio Pro or Compressor, so I don’t know too much about doing it through Squeeze, but looking at the settings, I would set it to 2 pass VBR with the bit rate to about 7500 and not less than about 5500. Obviously this is where you’ll get artifacting and stuff. I don’t really have problems using the Final Cut Studio encoders, so I generally go that route.
So, I think you need to figure out where the quality problems are introduced and figure out the settings at that point. I don’t use Avid, so I can’t help on that side, but I’m always happy with the AE output file I create. I did a test with Squeeze 4.3 and it looked ok.
Hope this helps and wasn’t too much of what you already knew…
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