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I thought 1 hour of footage equals 13GB’s of space?
Here is the deal. I used Windows movie maker to get my video footage from my camera to my pc. The file was close to an hour long, and the size was around 13 gigs. So I brought that footage into AE CS3. I broke the 1 hour footage into 3 different sections, rendering them out seperately.2 of the clips were 23 minutes each. The last clip was 14 minutes. Well, after rendering, the clip sizes were HUGE!
The 23 minute clips were close to 40 GB’s each, and the 14 minute one was 24 GB’s.
My goal was to render them out then bring them back into After Effects without losing quality.
I guess my question is why are they rendering out so large? I kept the same size of the original 1 hour footage, 720 x 480. The format I rendered it out is Video for Windows.
Any thoughts? I want to bring these back into AE to edit without losing quality.
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3 Replies
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Seems to me you´ve rendered it on lossless preset/format.
That is uncompressed. If you wanna keep the DV quality and size you have to change the preset from lossless to Microsoft DV.
Or change format options on the Output Module.
That is probably the thing.
Hope I was of some help.
Cheers.
a.ninguem.
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[Adriano Ninguem] “Seems to me you´ve rendered it on lossless preset/format.
That is uncompressed. If you wanna keep the DV quality and size you have to change the preset from lossless to Microsoft DV.
“Lossless isn’t uncompressed, it’s just compressed losslessly =) But it will result in much larger files than DV.
However, importing DV and rendering back out to DV will result in some loss in quality as you are going through an additional decode->encode cycle with a lossy codec.
Bottom line is that there is no way to avoid this very small loss in quality without ending up with very large files.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Yep.
Compressed video (e.g. DV) has to be decompressed in order to view it. When you stop viewing it, it shrinks back into its compressed state. Basically.
When you take a compressed video file and re-render it “uncompressed”, that basically means you expand it to viewing status and leave it there. Big as life. It doesn’t look any better, but it takes up a lot more room.
If you want to work with DV files in an editing app, cuts-only, you can assemble the DV clips together with no changes to the file quality or file-size-per-second. However, AE doesn’t work that way. It always renders vdieo, that is it changes it. If you have DV in and want DV out of AE, even if you do nothing to the clip, you will render it, and recompress to DV. This means quality loss, since you’re compressing again. To avoid quality loss when recompressing in AE, you have to use a high quality, lossless codec such as Animation, 8-bit Uncompressed and so on. But often, we just live with one recompression to DV.
“Lossless” is like “uncompressed”, except lossless can give you smaller file sizes without quality loss … kind of like ZIP files.
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