Grayed out frames??? HELP

[David Johnson]

Are you working with footage of any kind of codec AE doesn’t like?

Courtesy of forum leader Mr. Dave LaRonde …

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

[Chris Mcfall]

Do you mean like a GOP (group of pictures) format, Thats something I hadn’t considered… They were handed off to me as avi files but not sure what the compression codecs were, I will check it out, I’m fairly sure you hit the nail on the head! I was beginning to think it was a ram issue… Thanks very much 🙂