Jpeg photo moves are bad-jaggy, stairstepped

[Brendan Coots]

Generally the best way to do photo animations like this is to set up a 720×480 comp, import your pictures, add them to the stage and animate, then output to animation codec 100% quality. With or without fields is up to you, but I always do progressive/no fields.

If you are doing things this way, you should be golden. It sounds like you might be overthinking the settings and asking AE to do nonstandard things that will cause problems. There is no need to create comps with wacky sizes or worry about square vs. non-square. After Effects is smart enough to handle all the details for you if you just start with a 720×480 comp.

One word of advice. Unless you are zooming WAY in on your photos, I would not import 8MP images into After Effects. That will consume an unnecessary amount of RAM and resources, and will cause renders to crawl. For most general applications, images of about 2000×2000 are the largest I would recommend, depending on your specific zooming needs.

[Ed Cilley]

[beenyweenies] “set up a 720×480 comp”
Believe me, I didn’t start making this thing more complicated. I have worked in AE for years, but now I’m going to FCP (vs. Avid) and using still images, and have run into this odd problem.

So… I took your advice,
– started a new composition from scratch, (720×480-using the DV preset),
– resized the 3504×2336 image to 200×1333,
– added my photo (with one additional layer for the dissolve, nothing else yet),
– did a small zoom-in (didn’t go past 70% enlargement), and got the same thing.

Here is a link to a small portion of the clip. It’s full res (80Mb) animation codec, lower field. The problem is the ringing around the metal edges, especially at the bottom between the black and the metal edge.
https://www.jumpcutpictures.com/Samples/2-4_PS2.mov

Ed

[Brendan Coots]

Your problem is fairly common with any strong edges that are angled like that, especially on crisp imagery. The problem is that every other pixel of the edge is falling on the next horizontal pixel row down, and as the camera moves in the pixels are hopping down one line of resolution at a time.

The fact that the image is so sharp is making the problem worse, because the softer the pixels the more they tend to “float” between rows of resolution rather than popping like that.

I would precomp the animations and add 2px of Fast Blur to them (precomp because 2px blur on that large of an image wouldn’t have any effect), render out your animation and view it on a broadcast monitor via FCP. Adding a small amount of blur like this solves a lot of creep issues and usually isn’t even slightly noticeable once displayed on a set.

[Ed Cilley]

SOLVED!

So, I tried several of the suggestions from the posting here, the results were always the same (or worse), jaggy edges.

I finally started trying small renders and viewing the original QT file. When I turned off “Use Open GL Renderer” the images were sharp and clean. I went back to some original settings, 720×480, lower field, Animation Codec, NO Open GL Renderer, and tried again. Nice sharp edges.

I am using an Intel MacBook Pro, with AE 7.0. I turned down the amount of RAM usage that AE is allowed to use and solved the other problem I was having–crashes. Life is good.

Thanks for your help.