MPEG2 from CS4 to CS5.5

[Kevin Camp]

i can’t offer any suggestions for getting cs5.5 to render mpeg2 like cs4 (i have no idea why there would be a difference), but i can say that you should get much better mpeg2 compression if you render from ae as lossless or uncompressed (or maybe use photo-jpeg, prores or dnxhd), then take it to a compression utility (like media encoder or compressor) to create the mpeg2.

any utility that can do a multi-pass mpeg2 encode will do a much better job maintaining iamge quality and data rate that ae can… ae (even cs4) can’t render frames, and then compare them to frames that have been rendered and will be rendered to then create interframe compression (like you’d like mpeg2 to use) for a given frame…

ae can really only use intraframe (jpeg-like) compression, so when you limit it to a low data rate, all that compression has to be done at a single frame level, and you get poor image quality. a multi-passs compression will do both inter and intraframe compression and can maintain a much better level of image quality.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ryan John]

Im aware of and already tried that approach. Both through dynamic link and also by multiple rendering and the result is the same with a lot of degradation.

The problem is that the quality of the mpeg2 that CS4 produces directly is significantly better than anything CS5.5 has produced directly or via encoder, even with a big change in the bitrate.

Somebody has reported a similar problem over in the Premiere forum;
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/911992

….unfortunately I cant seem to get the solution made there to correspond to AE.