Help! Problems stitching together large format sequence

[Walter Soyka]

[Jonathan Lutjens] “Now I’m trying to stitch those 3 sequences into 1 H.264 quicktime movie (which is what I have to deliver to the production company) and things are not going well. After Effects seems to be getting hung up on certain files in the sequence, but the files open fine in PS and show no apparent corruption.”

I design motion media for widescreen events, too, and I’m curious why the production company is asking for a 3600×1080 h.264.

First, the production company is almost certainly going to have to either anamorphically squish your output, or re-split your output again (probably into 2 channels of 1920×1080 video) for playback. If you can get some more details on the playback system and its requirements, you can probably avoid an unnecessary generational loss and extra work on-site.

Secondly, you shouldn’t use After Effects for compressing h.264. It’s not capable of multi-pass compression, which is necessary for good encodes. Instead, you can make a lossless movie from AE and use another compression program like Compressor, Episode, or Squeeze.

Thirdly, you may or may not get unexpected results encoding and playing h.264 in a non-standard frame size that large.

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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Thanks for the response.

I got an error with multi-processing turned off (although this machine has 16G of RAM).

AEGP Plugin PNGIO Support: PNGIO library error:

I can’t remember the rest. Something about too many characters or the like. I’m trying to do a rename on the sequence to see if that helps.

I will also try to switch over to Media Encoder.

Sorry for short responses, I’m trying to get this thing out the door!!!

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Thanks for the responses.

When you guys say that AE is incapable of multi-pass compression, does that mean that the final movies won’t play correctly and will have file errors, or simply that AE doesn’t do correct compression for H.264 and one should use another piece of software in order to get the best looking color, motion, etc?

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Question #2:

Is there any reason that a png sequence would be causing the problem? I mean the file type.

[Jacques Davis]

Did you copy or moved your png files from a folder to an other , from a hard drive to an other ?
I did and sometimes some files get corrupted.

AEX do not accept them and give you an error message.

These corrupted files seems to look fine when you open them in photoshop but if you look closer
you can see that the top or the bottom line is lightly corrupted, it seems that the line start with pixel two instead of pixel one.

In this case you just have te re render these png files

hope it helps

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Thanks Jacques,

I think that actually did happen. I went back and looked more closely at some files and it looks like during a copy they were indeed funktified.

Thankfully, the original files are still ok!

Jon

[Walter Soyka]

[Jonathan Lutjens] “When you guys say that AE is incapable of multi-pass compression, does that mean that the final movies won’t play correctly and will have file errors, or simply that AE doesn’t do correct compression for H.264 and one should use another piece of software in order to get the best looking color, motion, etc?”

AE should create a perfectly compliant h.264 file, but multi-pass compression really improves the visual quality of the final product. It allows the compressor to analyze the video before it makes any compression decisions, so the output tends to show less blocking or banding.

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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Thanks for all your help, everyone.

Things are looking much better. I’m starting a new render tonight and hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be in business.

It looks like 1 of my stitching attempts worked, so I only need to re-render 2/3s of the movie. Thankfully, I’ve done this enough that I built in plenty of time to the schedule for just this kind of crisis!