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Jerky motion
Hello,
I guess here’s the most basic questions of all: how to achieve a smooth (i.e. not jerky) movie file out of an animation, and end up with a movie file that’s small enough to publish on an intranet for streaming?
I have a project that’s entirely done within AE CS4, apart from one picture file (png) that I imported. The rest is text composed within AE, some light movements and a moving camera. In the composition the camera is flying through texts hovering on top of the image.
It seems that whichever output options I use, the motion is quite jerky. I’ve tried various Quicktime options: 10-bit uncompressed, animation, H.264 codecs.
My comp’s frame rate is 25, and so have the render settings been also.
The end result has always been a large file, with motion that is far from smooth.
I’ve taken a look at somebody else’s work: they’ve produced (I don’t know with which software) a H.264 Quicktime file that has large (1280 x 720) dimensions, it’s quite small in size for it’s lenght (25 MB, 1.15 minutes), a decent data rate (less than 4000 kbits/s) and it looks stunning, very rich in detail and ultra-smooth movement. I wonder how this can be accomplished: I’m trying to output an animation created within AE with similar settings, yet my stuff looks nowhere near as good.
I understand that I should put a few years into studying digital video to figure these types of things out, but I’m afraid I have a bit of a situation and need to get the animation finished. So apologies for really basic questions, anyway any and all help is much appreciated.
BTW, I wonder also if it’s possible to change the data rate of the output file somewhere?
Cheers,
Janne -
2 Replies
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Hi again,
To answer my own question, in case somebody else’s thinking about this: it turned out that I simply didn’t have the frame rate to support a fluid motion in the movement that my animation contained. I had a few quite swift camera movements across the imaginary space, and since I didn’t have enough frames in between the far left and far right views, this resulted in some jerky motion that really can’t be avoided without inceasing the frame rate.
A learning experience for me (not surprisingly, this was my first animation); I didn’t come think of this when planning my piece. So I think going forward I’ll first think about what the final medium will be before even considering animating certain things. I.e. not extremely fast camera movements across a space if a high frame rate can’t be used etc.
Thanks to Dave for the insights. Definitely an art as much as a science.
Cheers,
Janne -
Thanks for your post. I’ve been doing simple scans and have not been able to figure out why they are jerky after rendering…no info out there that I can see. But you’re right! When I switched from 29.97 to 59.94 and then rendered everything was smooth! Finally! Thanks again.
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