Extreme Widescreeen! exporting a movie for LED banner

Adobe After Effects

Extreme Widescreeen! exporting a movie for LED banner

Posted by Lautaro Gonda on February 12, 2011 at 10:48 pm

I’m animating a banner that will be displayed on a very very long LED display in Yankee Stadium. The dimensions are a crazy 152×11670. They want a 29.97fps uncompressed AVI file. My plan was to export a MOV from AE then convert it to an AVI.

However, with the Animation codec it comes out to a 1GB file. I’m not sure if this is the cause, but the movie won’t play in quicktime or VLC. The preview icon seems to look ok but when I open it in a player it’s just a long black strip.

Is Animation the right setting? Should I be using a different “uncompressed” codec? Why won’t my movie play? Are the weird dimensions or file size messing with QT and VLC?

Mac OS 10.6.6
AE CS5

Walter Soyka replied 15 years, 5 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Tudor “ted” jelescu
February 13, 2011 at 10:26 am

Animation codec is rarely going to play smooth on a good system- you need one build to handle uncompressed video. It is normal to get a large file size and it is also normal to have the clip stop or even not to play if the frame size is quite large as in your situation. Take that .mov and convert it using Adobe Media Encoder and see if your compressed file plays ok.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Robert Hoisan
February 13, 2011 at 2:11 pm

Yes, big file size has a big impact usually on playing a video. You may also try to convert the video using QT settings (pro).

Thanks!

Robert Hoisan
Motion Graphics Artist
Lautaro Gonda
February 13, 2011 at 10:34 pm

Thanks guys.

I dropped it onto a FCP sequence and it plays fine there.

Does anyone have experience with this large LED banners? Is it normal for the file size to be in the 2GB range? They say they want it uncompressed but I don’t understand why they would.
Walter Soyka
February 14, 2011 at 2:36 pm

[Lautaro Gonda] “Does anyone have experience with this large LED banners? Is it normal for the file size to be in the 2GB range? They say they want it uncompressed but I don’t understand why they would.”

Depending on the length of the footage, sure, 2GB could be reasonable. 11670×152 is a pretty big raster — more pixels than 720p HD, but a little less than 1080p.

[Lautaro Gonda] “They say they want it uncompressed but I don’t understand why they would.”

Their playback system is either capable of playing uncompressed, or it transcodes incoming media to its own internal format for playback. In either case, uncompressed delivery preserves visual information without introducing compression artifacts.

As the other posters have mentioned, you may want to compress this to watch it back on your own system, but if the delivery spec is uncompressed, you should honor that.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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