OpenGL rendering quality….?

[Todd Kopriva]

Hey, what propaganda? I routinely say that I find OpenGL rendering to only be useful for two things:

– the OpenGL – Interactive preview mode
– occasional test renders when all that I care about is the timing of the animation, not the visual fidelity

The After Effects team as a whole says pretty much the same thing.

In fact, here’s a quote from near the top of the page about rendering with OpenGL:
“Important: Because not all features of a composition can be rendered with OpenGL—and because some features that can be rendered with OpenGL are rendered with different results—you may only want to use OpenGL rendering to accelerate previews and to provide faster rendering for non-final results.”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Scott Morrison]

Thanks Dave and Todd, for the information and VERY prompt responses. You guys are the best.

Note to self: OpenGL bad….(except for preview).

Scott Morrison
Just an amateur trying to learn

[Michael Todd]

Hey Guys

I wanted to ask if you guys would please clarify that the quality of OpenGL rendering not being as good as software is a known issue ?

I am finding that in a project I am currently working on and wanting to test how much faster OpenGL was (which it was) but the source footage which is a 1280×720 .png sequence in a comp the same size and set to square pixels and has no effects applied to it is appearing noticeably more blocky/pixelated than with OpenGL disabled .

As an interesting test I provided AE with the same sequence that was 2048×2048 (power of 2) and the result is better but softer but still not as defined as the original source being rendered without OpenGL .

I have the latest card drivers and although nvidia says that they now support OpenGL 3, AE CS4 which I am currently running is only showing as using version 2.1 . This is on a Windows 7 x64 platform is that makes any difference in this case .

[Todd Kopriva]

It’s not that it’s a “known issue” (which implies a bug). It’s that the purpose is simply not for anything other than fast _test_ renders and previews. This isn’t just me talking. As I said in my previous message on this thread, the engineer who is responsible for this feature looked at me like I was crazy when I asked if there were any circumstances in which OpenGL rendering should be used for final output. That’s why there’s a big note with the word ‘Important’ in bold type at the top of the section in Help about OpenGL rendering.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Michael Todd]

Thanks for the reply .

Sure I’ve been seeing this sentiment all over the place but I was trying to get to the bottom of how bad it actually is .

From my experience so far it seems to have failed at the first hurdle due to not being able to correctly draw footage that has come straight into the comp with no effects or scaling etc . Is this what most people get ?

[Petrache Nicolae]

this is some kind of joke i assume. i buyed a 1000$ nvidia video card certified by adobe as compatible and i just thrown the money on the window. a project made with opengl is done in 15 min and in software mode in 2-3 hours? you talk about preview…like with this card i have flawless play in the project. exactly for what are we supposed to spend the money? for video cards wich can’t be used in your software becouse it makes the image horible? if this is well known, why do we have the option to use hardware encoding via opengl?

[Todd Kopriva]

> why do we have the option to use hardware encoding via opengl?

For rough, fast previews.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Petrache Nicolae]

yes, for “fast” preview i can activate the option from bellow the image . and for encoding, why do we have the option to render via opengl? or do you don’t know what you have made? you should be shamed…such big company to use such fake advertise…unbeliveble