exporting to avi

[Michael Duff]

so I’m guessing that your source was compressed DV footage …. and you rendered out uncompressed … hence the size difference… if you are not all that knowledgable on compression and codecs do a bit of a google search and you’ll find lots of information….

my suggestion is to render out of AE only the bits you are modifying, then import just those back into your edit program.

With the timecode window you could make a smaller composition that’s just a black solid with the timecode over it and just render that out, then put it on in your edit program …. then you’d also have a timecode window you can keep for future use.

if you must render out the entire program then you’ll need to decide on a codec to use… DV is very lossy but your files will remain small … there are other options like Quicktime Animation, PhotoJPEG, and more…. you just have to balance file size with quality.

hope that helps!

[Vaderkrypt]

I also have a question about compression since im very new to this field.

I have a sony DV camera. I use Avid Liquid to capture the clips on my DV tape. Should I directly use those captured clips to do whatever i want in AE or should i output them first using whatever codecs available before bringing them into AE ?? I’m really having a hard time with keying a DV clip.

thanks

[Kevin Camp]

as for the first post… generally i would create the pieces in ae (your 2 titles and time code) and render those out as separate pieces with alpha channels to the lossless animation codec (or even an image sequence if your nle won’t take the mov file). i would then do to the compositing in your nle. that way you won’t have to worry about recompressing your original footage and losing more data/image quality and you are avoiding the yuv to rgb color/gama shift.

as for the later post… if the original footage is dv tape (i assume dv25), converting it is not going to reduce artifacts or give your more color to work with. if you can work with the origianl dv file, without having to further export out of the nle (and risk further compression) it will be the same quality as converting/exporting the same footage to a lossless/uncompressed codec, but save you the time and drive space of converting to lossless/uncompressed.

to get a better key in dv, make sure ae is interpretting the footage correctly, so it will de-interlace it correctly, then try to remove/lessen the artifacts.. there is an animation preset in the effects and presets that can do an ok job, it slightly blurs the green and blue channels and it seems to help prior to pulling the key.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Vaderkrypt]

Thanks Kevin,

i think my major problem is lighting the greenscreen. I don’t have enough space for all the lights to be bounced off and onto the screen and more lights for the foreground etc..

I guess i’ll have to wait for summer to shoot outside !!