COMMON AFTER EFFECTS QUESTIONS !!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE LOOK HERE FIRST

[Aditya Chopra]

Hi,

I am a novice in AE and have made my first animations and I tried to find out over the internet which render settings are the best for my purpose. There are so many answers out there that I am confused and I hope someone here can tell me what I should do. I tried to look in past posts but they haven’t been able to resolve my issue.

My one minute animation contains text, pictures and sounds with effects such as blurs and glows. The animation is finalised and I want to use it on the web and in a slideshow in Open Office Impress. I would like the quality (resolution & colours) to be the highest possible without making the file so large that it does not play smoothly during a presentation or so large a download that it will not be downloaded.

The composition settings were default ones for NTSC Square Pixels 29fps 720×534. I have rendered it to Lossless options such as QT-None, QT-Animation and Lossless AVI. I have tried QT-Photo JPEG and the quality is resonable but the contrast in colors is lost (e.g the black backgournd becomes brighter – almost a dark grey). However, in all cases the files sizes are ~300-700MB. I have tried FLV format, where the file size in only 7MB and the picture quality is good but it does not work in Open Office.

[Kate Caplis]

Have you tried rendering it to WMV? I have found that if creation and playback is on a Windows machine, Windows Media Player does a much better job of compressing than Quicktime. And you should be able to embed in Open Office.

NTSC and PAL refer more to Standard Definition Broadcast/Tape resolutions and your are correct that they are not standards for web or presentations.

Also when creating for computer screens and live presentations the display settings of the live computer are very important. If you create your video file set at 720 x 540 it is best played back at that size display setting or close to it, say 800×600. In other words, if you were to play this file full screen on a display set at 1920 x 1200 it would look horrible at highest quality rendering.

As to the black stripe through the lettering, this could be what you are thinking and is an interlace problem. Try rendering with de-interlace effect on the text layers. It could also be a hardware issue? Your computer or video card may be struggling to render it. Try to optimize your computer by clearing cache in After Effects before rendering and also using CAPS-LOCK to disable display while rendering.

Lastly, if all else fails it may mean you have to use PowerPoint. You can embed flv files in Microsoft PowerPoint. Surf the web for the tutorial. Its a bit involved but it can be done.

Hope this helps

Kate Caplis
Final Cut Editor & Motion Designer
WhiteHorse BlackCat Studios
http://www.ladiesgeekjournal.com

[Aditya Chopra]

Thank you Kate for the detailed info.

A strategy that is working well for me is to render the animation of out AE as a lossless AVI and then use a 3rd party video conversion tool to covert into the formats depending on purpose – all the way from Blu-ray to YouTube. I haven’t tried it but I guess the packaged Media Encoder would do a good job at the conversions too.

For my presentation in Open Office, WMV did not work well but a high bit rate, compressed MPG did the job well and did not get any visible black lines. Hence, the black lines seem to be due to the hardware not being able to cope during playback but I will keep in mind the de-interlace aspect in future animations.

The CAPS-LOCK thing seems to have halved my render time!

Given the strengths of FLV files, I think I might change to PowerPoint in the future…

Thank you for your help.

Adi.

[Michael Hurley]

I have an AE CS4 project that is 5min in length and the comp size is 720p it takes 33 hours to render with my macbook pro, 2.66 Core 2 duo with 4GB Ram & 256 GB Discreet Video Card, using an external 7200 rpm drive.

Is this typical? Using Adobe Premiere cs4 a five min clip would commonly take around and hour.

I’m new to AE and have started to produce some decent clips but cant seem to get a good export in a timely manner!

would love some feedback.

Thank you

[Michael Hurley]

Thank you for the reply!

I have a psd for flourish that I used the writeon feature
I have a text layer for a countdown from 5:00 to 0:00
I have a some snow effects falling
I have a couple snow flakes that use the writeon feature and rotate with some opacity changes.
I have some adjustment layers with changing

Thats all, no film/movie clips of any kind

When I disable the flourish and snowflakes from the view ( They are in comps) the playback is normal
however when I enable them AE comes to a screeching halt. VERY slow and renders extremely slow.

I used a tutorial where they said that the layer needed to be converted into a comp maintaining all the ? can’t quite remember but now I’m stuck. I have a pretty good comp but can’t get it out or if I do it takes more than a day to render

Any thoughts?

[Ali Atoui]

thank you very much

[Sutraye Pavan]

The motion feature needs a light to follow could not find light named ‘motion path1’at current time choose>layer>new>light to created light

but i couden’t set the motion path 1 layer to Air/Motion Path property

[Andy Middleton]

Hello All.
I just looked at the help file in AEcs3. I too am trying to copy and paste vector path(s) from Illy into Ae. According to the help file, anything other than a path property being selected within a shape layer will cause the path to become a mask…. well that Doesnt seem to be the case, at all. No matter what I do when I paste the vector path into the newly created shape layer, it ends up as a stack of masks. the shape property is unmodified. I have tried everything from pasting into a shape layer with a shape selected to just pasting with the layer name selected. Nothing works. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? I just want to put a fill on the silly thing then apply the repeater to it.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Andy

[Ash Davis]

https://www.videocopilot.net watch all the basic introductions.

[Andy Zanto]

It took quite a bit of digging, but I was looking for the same thing. You’re close. Simply copy an AI path into memory. Back in After Effects, create a new shape layer. Twirl it’s arrow down. Click on the add button, and select path. Twirl down the arrow next to Path 1 (the one you just added), then select the word “Path” under Path 2. And now paste your.

For more info see: https://layersmagazine.com/shape-layers-after-effects.html