importing an After Effects movie into Avid

[John Cuevas]

Is your AE comp set to 720×486?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[Achmex]

Yes, the AE composition is 720×486.

[Dave Schweitzer]

How does the picture look on your TV? Is your complaint mostly about compression artifacts around your text or areas of sharp contrast?

Check out this informative article right here on the Cow regarding DV and text:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/hodgetts_philip/titles/index.html

Also, After Effects’ Best Quality setting from the factory has field rendering turned OFF! Make sure for NTSC video that you turn on lower field first and keep your Avid import setting at lower field first also. This has more to do with smooth motion in animations, but I just wanted to pass this on.

[Adam Duplay]

Its simple.

You are rendering an uncompressed movie out of After Effects – but Avid Express Pro only handels DV quality. So your movie is being compressed 5 times upon import into AVID. (DV25=1/5Unompressed)

To edit uncompressed, you need to upgrade to Adreneline.

Adam Duplay

[Joseph Mehr]

“To edit uncompressed, you need to upgrade to Adreneline.”
Fortunately NO ! Xpress pro + Mojo also works with 1;1

[Achmex]

Dave thanks for the article link. Yes, you are correct that most of the issue is with text and higher contrast areas. I’m just trying to deal with the supplied graphics, hoping for another solution.

Sep, you mention that with Xpress Pro and Mojo you can do 1:1. I do have Mojo. Can you please elaborate.

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

[Michael Hancock]

Sep means exactly what he said…Mojo gives you the ability to work with uncompressed footage.

And never, ever do your titles in DV25 411. They will look like crap.

Since you have the Mojo you can use 1:1 (uncompressed). It should be one of your options on import for media resolution. If you’ve already imported a lot of stuff at DV25 and the original files are still in their original place on your system/network, or you know where they are, delete them in the Avid and batch import them, changing your resolution setting from DV25 to 1:1. You should see a difference, and it will save you a lot of time.

Also, if you’re rendering out of AE with an alpha, make sure you set it to Straight Alpha. Avid doesn’t place nice with premultiplied alphas. Or render out a png or targa sequence and import that. It works just as well, only takes longer to import. But always do your titles at 1:1 (if space allows–if not, at least DVCPro50 or whatever it is, I’m not at a system right now). Let us know if it works.

Mike.

[Joseph Mehr]

Nothing to add to Mike’s post
Just about DV50, which gives really good results, MUCH better compared to DV25.
In PAL, I suggest to use the combination of DV25 and DV50 because field order is identical. However 1:1 is upper field first and DV resolutions are lower field first!

[Achmex]

Thanks for all of the information.
I’m out on a shoot today, but I will try the import again tomorrow and report back.

Thanks again.

[Sasocchia]

Hello guys, I do have the same problem of losing resolution when importing graphics (.mov) into Avid as well.I made three test with lower field first, upper field first, and non interlaced; they all look the same when imported into the Avid.I work with the Adrenaline v.1.6.4. I select the 1:1 resolution when importing.Unfortunately I find always a bad result:blurried edges on both text and shapes, and just looks awful as definition, in general, to me.
The original files are nice and crisp.Full resolution, best quality;720×486;Quicktime with Animation compression(no compression). I also check on AE the Continuously Resterize box when it’s about text that I create in AI.Again, the original file seems good to me.When I import into Adrenaline, I have loss of quality.Maybe it has to do with Avid Codecs or something I don’t know?Alessia