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Layered elements in video don’t scale to full screen as well
I’ve got two elements layered over the original video
– a vector symbol imported from illustrator
– and an illustration imported as a png with alpha channelIn the final video file rendered from AE everything looks fine as long as the video is displayed at 100% resolution/dimensions. But when I go to full-screen display the layered elements don’t scale well and start looking jagged. (scaling is constrained to original aspect ratio). The background video looks fine. Is there something I can do with the layered elements to get them to scale as well as the original background video?
Thanks in advance.
DL -
5 Replies
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How have you rendered the video?
Assuming it’s a normal video file (such as AVI, MOV, WMV, etc.) the computer can’t tell the difference between any layers. All it knows is one solid image. The problem is that video is a lot noisier and fuzzier than the solid lines you added. It’s just as jaggy, but since there are no solid lines, it’s less noticable.
Now, you may have rendered fields incorrectly or something similar which could also contribute to the problem. How you rendered it (and how you’re viewing it) may make a difference though, so fess up; what’d you do?
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I’ve tried rendering as an uncompressed MOV (Animation codec), F4V and H.264 from AE CS 5.5. The source video is digital – no fields. The viewer/player doesn’t seem to make a difference – desktop QT player and Flash player in a browser. It looks great except when played full screen at certain sizes.
I’m guessing you’re right about the background video being noisier and fuzzier. The vector and imported PNG layers are cleaner and and sharper. Is there some way to soften or increase anti-aliasing or something just for those layers?
thanks
DLambert -
Do you have an example of this issue you can show?
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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You do realize that there is no way to scale video above 100% and retain full resolution, right? For example, just like still images (which are generally 4-16 times the resolution of video), scaling a video to 200% screen size means cutting the resolution in half, scaling to 400% is cutting resolution to one-fourth, etc. So, images are never going to look as clean scaled up as they do at 100%.
Just to be clear, nothing I’m saying is counter to anything Michael has said … both the video and the vector images are reduced resolution when scaled … it’s just more noticeable with the vectors due the sharp edges. Blurring the edges of the vectors and/or adding a very faint glow to the edges before rendering the output will help some, but nothing is going to make them look the same scaled as they do at normal size.
A screen shot of your particular images would indeed allow offering more specific suggestions.
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I realize that when you scale video above 100% you lose resolution. I was wondering why certain objects didn’t scale as well as others at full screen in certain situations. The video is high def and is actually displayed at close to 100% res when viewed at full screen.
I was wrong in my earlier post when I said that the viewer/player doesn’t seem to make any difference. It turns out this is a playback issue and not an AE rendering issue. The rendered movie is fine and looks great at full screen in most cases. On at lease one Macbook Pro 15″ when using the Flash player certain elements look bad at full screen. It may be a software scaling issue?
logo breaking up in full screen mode on my Macbook 15″
(logo is a nice high res source file in AE and looks good in most playback situations)
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