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Exporting for Avid
Hi everyone. I’m looking for help on exporting clips from AE7 to Avid. I’m exporting raw footage with the animation codec out of Avid Symphony to bring into AE7 to do the keying.
However, when I bring them into AE, they look like crap. Here is a clip with field separation turned OFF:
And here is the same frame with lower fields first interpretation:
Obviously neither of those look very good out of AE, and when I bring them into Avid, they look just as bad. I’ll pose the same question in the Avid forum since it might be my import or export settings, but is there anything I can do in AE to make these clips look better?
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5 Replies
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For God’s sake, don’t render to 720×540. Render to 720×486 for Avid, or just about any other NTSC except DV or DVD (480). Do this by dragging your 540 comp into a D1 preset comp and rendering that.
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That’s helpful. I don’t know why the projects we do here are 720×540. At my last job, we worked in 720×486 and I never had these sorts of problems.
Now, I brought that 720×540 comp into a 720×486 timeline and scaled it down. Are there still going to be interlacing issues, and will Avid recognize this file without having to start a new Avid project?
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If you’ve scaled down a 720×540 comp (one that contains no interlaced footage) into a 486 comp and rendered the 486 comp then yes, your process should work. You can choose to interlace in the Render Settings if you want, but you don’t have to. If you do, make sure the field order is right for the Avid.
Will the Avid recognize it? It should, if it was rendered to 720×486, 29.97, Meridien codec. If you’re on a 720×480 xPress system, I can’t help you.
Now when you import an interlaced movie into AE: if you separate fields when importing (or interpreting) that movie, you can then scale it down within a comp.
But never never scale down an interlaced movie in the output module.(sorry for the caps, I can’t get Cow Bold options on the Mac)
Yes, you can WORK in 720×540, but you must RENDER to 720×486 for Avid, 720×480 for DV or DVD. You MUST.
I RECOMMEND that you work in a 720×486 D1 comp preset and use the Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) correction button in the comp window to make things look normal while you work. Then you won’t have to worry about these things. Your bosses are probably still thinking about AE before PAR correction, when we pretty much had to work in 540.
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That is all great info. My boss doesn’t think in terms of AE at all, since he prefers to do his effects on our Nitris machine.
I’m rendering the clip at 720×486 right now, so we’ll see what happens. Clips that I’ve rendered at 720×486 have looked bad in Avid before, but I assume that might be because the Avid sequence is 720×540, so it’s being scaled up(?).
Pardon my ignorance, like I mentioned, I’ve been away from Avid for a few years, so this is probably a pretty basic question: Is there a reason to work in 720×540 over 720×486 in Avid?
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Sorry, I’ll post the Avid questions in the Avid forum.
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