Changing Comp Size Without Loosing Resolution?

[Joey Foreman]

Look in your sequence settings and see what the compressor is set to.
If it’s DV/NTSC change it to animation, assuming that’s what you rendered to from AE. Just change it long enough to see how that affects the AE footage in the timeline.
If you’re intercutting with DV footage, I would recommend recompressing that to Prores 422 with the Media Manager, then re-render your AE clips to ProRes from AE.
Then change your Sequence Settings in FCP to ProRes as well.

If you don’t do this, all of the clips in your timeline will have to be rendered to Animation, and will require re-rendering again if you apply any filters.
Making everything ProRes will get you too a happier, less processor-intensive medium.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Compositor/VFX Artist

[Bob Tanner]

Sorry I wasn’t clear, the FCP timeline is a whole montage and the AE video is just a small part, I won’t be able to let anyone know if I was able to fix the problem for another couple days, since I’m not home…

Thanks,
Zevie

[Bob Tanner]

I made a new comp, and made it a NTSC Widescreen (1.21). I then took my original video, (already exported from AE) and dragged it into my new NTSC (720×480) comp. It still happens, the more I scale in, the better the quality is, the more I scale out, the worse the quality gets.

I tried ‘Fit to Comp’ and ‘Fit Height to Comp’ and I still get the same unclear results… I’m seeing these results in After Effects preview window and the quality is set to ‘full’

[Bob Tanner]

I’ve included part of the video that I’ve been having problems with. I still don’t understand why I’m loosing so much quality when I drag it into my FCP timeline (720×480) and when I rescale it in AE using a 720×480 comp…

*EDIT – The same thing is happening in FCP, when I drag it into my 720×480 timeline, when it’s scaled it, the quality is better and when I scale out the quality gets worse…

You can download part of the video below

1486_problem.mov.zip