DVCPRO-HD to After Effects then back to FCP

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

DVCPRO-HD to After Effects then back to FCP

Posted by Chris Borjis on August 30, 2007 at 3:40 pm

I’ve got some jobs coming up that require use of DVCPRO-HD and I’ve been wondering how you guys goto After Effects and back with minimal loss of quality and aspect ratio preservation.

I know some have said do straight 1920×1080 but I’m not really sure that will work and here is why. In the lower thirds graphics they provided it tells specifically how to deal with the graphics in fcp so that the DVCPRO-HD size does not distort the image. Here it is in quotes:

“*Note: The HD lower thirds in Photoshop are built with a square pixel aspect ratio to fill out a full
uncompressed frame of HD. The lower third graphic is 1920×1080 pixels with a 1:1 square pixel aspect ratio.
What this may mean when using a compressed codec in Final Cut such as DVCPRO HD (1280×1080 frame
resolution) is that the image will appear squished or distorted when dropped onto a timeline of DVCPRO HD
footage. In Final Cut 5.1.2, the work around to this is to Option+Double Click the .PSD lower third file on the
timeline to load it in the viewer, and then to change the Scale parameter to 100 in the

Chris Borjis replied 18 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Will Griffith
August 30, 2007 at 3:56 pm

-Use a true 1920×1080 composition in AE.
-Stretch DVCPROHD to Comp size.
-Set project to highest bitrate available
-Render to RGB codec such as Photo JPG 100%
or PNG or just encode into your finishing
format of choice, I.E. 10bit Uncompressed.

You can’t get around a little shift in color
going from YUV to AE RGB and back.

Will Griffith
Producer/Editor
Johnny H
August 30, 2007 at 4:55 pm

I don’t profess to knowing the best technical details but I just finished a large DVCProHD(59.94 fps) project with good success. There was a slight color shift when re importing my AE renders. Fortunately my scenes were short enough that I could take the entire scene into AE and render. This way I didn’t have to worry about matching back into the scene.

Here are the settings I used in After Effects (Ver7).
-These settings allowed my to drop my render files into my DVCPRO HD timeline without any rendering.
-If I remember correctly you cannot make some of these changes in AE6.5 or older

Custom Comp Settings:
Width 960 Height 720
Pixel Aspect Ration: HDV 1080/DVCPRO HD 720 (1:33)
Frame Rate: 59.94

Render Settings
Quality: Best
Resolution: Full
Size 960X720
Field Render: Off
Frame Rate: Use comp’s frame rate(59.94)

Output Settings
Format: Quicktime
Video Output: DVCPROHD 720p60, Spatial Quality = (100)
Stretch: NOT Checked

For creating still files in PhotoShop (CS2) I used these settings
-When working with this file in PhotoShop make sure you have have Pixel aspect Ration correction turned on under the view menu
Width 960 Height 720
Color Mode RGB / 8bit
Pixel Aspect Ration:DVCPRO HD (1:33)

I was very happy with the results of the AE(special effect) renders and didn’t feel the graphics took a hit because of the DVCPRO HD CODEC
John

John Hudson
Bright Light Visual Communications
Chris Borjis
August 30, 2007 at 5:14 pm

Thanks Johnny, thats what I was planning on doing as well, but with the 1080 flavor of dvcpro-hd.

The lower thirds stills are not animated so I will be following the strict instructions on that.

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