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Mainconcept MPEG2 / H264 refuse to encode interlaced footage
Don’t know what to say. I’m using After Effects CS3 to encode as “MPEG2 Blu-Ray” because it supports multiple cores and Encore CS3 does not. I’m giving H.264 a pass because when I import the results they’re always corrupt. (Side note: Is this going to generate a file that I can burn on a Blu-ray disc with Encore and expect the result to play?)
One can encode in a number of different ways. As it happens, my AE project is 59.94fps, and I very much want to keep that temporal information. Here is what I have tried:
59.94p project -> MainConcept “H264 Blu-ray” “HDTV 29.97fps” : A largely corrupt video.
59.94p project -> MainConcept “MPEG2 Blu-ray” “HDTV 29.97fps” : Video is fine but each frame is composed of identical fields, meaning half of the temporal info has been dumped.
59.94i project -> MainConcept “MPEG2 Blu-ray” “HDTV 29.97fps” : Identical to the above.
(This last item was accomplished by moving my 59.94p project into a 29.97fps timeline. The fact that AE properly interlaced consecutive frames was determined by re-importing the 29.97fps composition into another 59.94 comp.)
59.94p project -> MainConcept “MPEG2 Blu-ray” 720p 59.94fps : As one might expect, here the full 59.94fps is retained. However the resolution has of course suffered intolerably.In short, the ONLY time the MainConcept codec properly encoded 59.94 fields or frames per second was when I specified 720p@59.94fps, a resolution much lower than that of my project. I am desperately hoping that 1) there’s a way to get the full 1080i@59.94 fields per second, and 2) the output being generated by this “MPEG2 Blu-ray” codec is something I’m going to be able to use in Encore CS3.
Help? ;p
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4 Replies
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I think I know the cause. When you add it to the render que, go to render settings and one of the options is field render, which for some reason is set to none, if you change that to upper/lower first then I think you get back the interlaced footage. I may be completely wrong.
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Thanks for the suggestion.
The MainConcept codec does give the choice of field order when one uses an interlaced preset. In fact it doesn’t give the option of not picking a field order. The problem seems to be that AE will not feed an interlaced signal to any codec, under any circumstance, including one where the user has gone out of their way to ensure that the output is interlaced.
A lot of headaches would have been saved had AE provided users with the ability to interpret nested comps the way one can interpret footage. Really, AE’s support for interlaced video is just one tiny notch above PPro’s.
I would use Encore to encode the video if it made any difference, and if I could trust the da** program not to give me an error. Test encodes more often than not return a “not found” error just after transcoding is complete, and when that happens, the only thing left to do is start over. Imagine the HORROR of having that happen at the end of a 50+ hour encode.
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You are looking at the output module settings. The settings(right above that on the render window) I was talking about is AE only and completely independent of the codec. Render setting based on: “best settings” is what I’m talking about.
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You, sir, are my savior.
For what it’s worth, the happy magical formula seems to be this:
For a (hd) composition at 59.94p, drag it to a new comp at 29.97fps. AE will treat it as a proper interlaced comp, rendering every pair of frames from the original comp as a pair of fields in the new comp (without telling you, or even providing any sort of indication). When exporting, open the “best settings” and pick upper field first. Make sure to pick it also in whatever renderer you use.
So in the end, my complications stemmed from two factors: First, AE’s lack of indicators as to what it’s doing with the video. Second, AE’s tendency to have video options secreted away in about a half dozen different settings menus, and my corresponding inability to divine such workings.
But frankly, AE is a breath of fresh air next to Encore. Now.. I just need to hope that AE doesn’t essentially lock up once it’s done rendering the video, as it has about 40% of the time. (Unless I really do need to wait longer than five solid minutes before AE ties up whatever it needs to do at the end of a render.)
Oh, before I go… Assuming the day comes when I have another two hour video project that needs to be burned in high-def.. How can I get MainConcept’s H264 (or even MPEG2) codec to render in 2-pass mode in AE? Encore has this option. In fact, it has tons of presets, while AE’s version has almost none. And the presets are not inter-compatible, sadly. A single pass render is all I have time for, this time around, but in the future, it would absolutely be handy to have better quality options.
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