Export as WMV

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

WMV is not lossless. As all distribution formats, it’s highly compressed.

An AVI file can of course be uncompressed, but on the Mac version of AE, AVI is only available as a Quicktime export component (ie, it appears in File > Export) which is really not a recommended path to export video files from After Effects. Same for Flip4Mac.
So, yes, exporting a lossless Quicktime file and feeding that to an encoding application is a good idea.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Sammy Jay]

OK great, I will try that.

There is so much to learn about video codecs!

[David Bogie]

[sammy jay] “There is so much to learn about video codecs! “

Yar, understatement of the day.
You got your delivery codecs and your production/acquisition codecs.
There are literally hundreds of video codecs but only a scant few are platform agnostic. Almost none of the main Windows codecs ever made it to the Macintosh and those that did have not been updated in a very long time so they’re not really considered viable.

Your number of choices is reduced further by the fact that only the Animation codec is lossless and carries an alpha and is usable on almost any motion graphics or video application. “Usable” does not mean “playable.”

bogiesan

[Sammy Jay]

Interesting. Is there a common solution when it comes to doing post production on a mac – for a windows codec. What would your advice be to maintain the best quality for a WMV or AVI output?

Thanks a lot for your help 🙂

[Joey Burnham]

Animation is your best bet. I have been struggling for years to make good looking WMV’s on my mac, but have a solution that works beautifully.
You need to have the upgrade of flip4mac though. First I render out to uncompressed 10-bit (you can use animation if you like), then I render out to H264 at best quality. Then through QT I open the H264 file and export out to WMV. It solves the jerkiness problems and also there was a problem of horizontal lines in the video. These aren’t uncompressed files by any means but I thought I would post this anyway.
Joey

[Sammy Jay]

Thanks Joey – I will give that a shot. I’ll let you know how I go.

[Sammy Jay]

What is the advantage of the second compression in to H264 ? Wouldn’t that result in a less quality WMV? Am I wrong to think it would be a better result to export from AE as lossless, then convert in QT to WMV?

Would converting in Sorenson Squeeze give better results then QT or is it better for getting better quality web video at low sizes etc..?

[Joey Burnham]

[sammy jay] “Am I wrong to think it would be a better result to export from AE as lossless, then convert in QT to WMV?”

Try it out. I had many issues doing it this way. The WMV’s were jerky, unreliable, and sometimes had horizontal lines running through them. On multiple machines this happened. By going to H.264 first this seemed to solve the problem. Yes, it’s one more step of compression, but H.264 at best quality looks darn good!
Joey

[Sammy Jay]

Yeah I tried it and, yeah there was slight horizontal lines in parts. Off to bed now but I’ll give the H.264 a go in the morn! Cheers.

[Bryan Wienczkowski]

I had tried your method of double rendering in AE CS4 MAC OSX, and I still get poor poor WMV out of my updated Flip4Mac Studio Pro HD. All I currently have is a MOV with copy coming up on a black background. And when i get to the WMV version, the black background looks like it is crushing the letters. The WMV has lost a lot of its crispness that the MOV has.

I am not getting any of the other errors described in this thread…but my biggest complaint is that the WMV is sub-standard quality.

Source MOV: 480×352.

Any suggestions?

Bryan C Wienczkowski