footage has artifacts in AE, but not VLC

[Daniel Arts]

Is it DV25 footage? I know that when I play DV25 footage through Quicktime it often looks pixelated, though looks perfect in Final Cut.

[Truls Huseboe]

Actually I don´t know what the original footage was shot with, the file I have is compressed, but it´s most probably a DV camera of some sort.

That being said, I´m not talking about pixelation and small quality artifacts, it´s a lot worse. In the beginning of the clip the whole left side is distorted and with different colors, and a couple of seconds in the half of the image is being distorted from the top down. Another thing to note is that the artifacts are static, meaning they never change, which led me to believe it was the footage, but like i said, it looks fine in VLC.

[Kevin Camp]

[Daniel Arts] “I know that when I play DV25 footage through Quicktime it often looks pixelated, though looks perfect in Final Cut.”

you can actually fix that with a setting in quicktime… open qt and choose quicktime>preferences. from the general settings check the option for ‘use high quality video settings when available’.

yeah, it’s kind of silly to have to say you want to view something in the best quality possible… but it’s a hold over setting from when cpu speed was measured in mhz and ram in mb…

i doubt that will help the ae vs vlc image quality issue though…

in quicktime, when the file is open, choose window>movie inspector. under format it should say what the codec is. that might be helpful….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

can you use vlc to convert it to another codec…? maybe a quicktime lossless animation or photo-jpeg…

even though it is already an .mov, vlc (or where ever it came from) may have used a non-standard quicktime codec, so you are having issues with it in other quicktime based applications.

converting it to a standard qt codec (like animation or photo-jpeg) may help.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Truls Huseboe]

I haven´t tried converting the movie clip, and although it might work I´m gonna try to reach a solution instead of creating a workaround. I want AE to work properly.

I´ll check what codec the file has and report.

[Kevin Camp]

this may not really be a problem with ae… there are many codecs that ae doesn’t work well with. any codec that uses temporal compression (also called interframe, p-frame or b-frame compression) will not work well in ae.

this type of compression drops data out of frames that does not change much from frame to frame, forcing ae to have to composite each frame from multiple frames before it can actually do any effecting…

since vlc is designed for streaming files, my guess is that many of the codecs it uses work with this type of compression. common codecs that use this type of compression are hdv, h.264, mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 and there are many others… many codecs designed for streaming will use temporal compression.

if you need to work with this type of footage in ae, it is always best to convert it to a codec that uses only intra-frame compression (or i-frame compression). to prevent further loss of image quality, uncompressed or lossless compressed codecs are very common as intermediate codecs to go from one application to another without loosing any quality, then compressing to the final codec at the very end of the project/piece.

if uncompressed/lossless creates files that are too big for your storage, quicktime’s photo-jpeg maintains very good image quality at high quality settings and is a very good alternative. again, this is just an intermediate codec, you can compress back to a streaming codec after you’re finished.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW