Output

[Kevin Camp]

there is no reason why the lossless animation codec would make the footage blury… it does not change any pixel data. there is some thing else going on…

are you trying to export your render? with a few exceptions, you will be far better off rendering your comps from the render queue. to send your comp the the render queue open the comp and then choose either make movie or add to render queue from the composition menu.

read the help file or manual about using the render queue, but essentially you have three settings areas to work with. the first is the render settings. here you can set things like field rendering and some quality settings and overides. you can normally just leave it at ‘best’, you can also create new settings and save them, for instance you often render in fields, save it as a preset.

the second set of settings is the output module. here you would set the codec and file format, whether to render an alpha channel and how to handle audio. most will leave the default ‘lossless’ setting, sometimes modifying it to include alpha. these too can be saved as presets, if you find you are always modifying a setting to include alpha or audio or something, just save it to use over and over. you can also have multiple output modules for a single render, so in the time it takes to render a comp once you can create several different media files using different codecs or file formats.

the last setting is the file destination, where you will save the file. pretty straight forward.

there are also post render settings that can be very useful to automaticly import the render, or import and replace usage. you’ll find it useful as you use ae more….

if you use the default render queue settings (‘best’ and ‘lossless’) for a render you should get the highest quality render , it should not look blury, it should look exactly like it did in the ram preview.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Randall Murphy]

By the way, thanks Kevin for your support…I really appreciate it!

I’m using the render que. I did my first run with quicktime animation, that was not as nice. The next run, I used the automatic preset which was “video for windows – lossless” that came out perfect.

This project means a lot to me…It’s a corporate presentation for my business. I shot it on a panasonic dvx100B. I’m using greenscreen, but I read an article yesterday about using Magic Bullet Suite first to clean up artifacts and deinterlace before keying to get better results. Would you recommend making it in 24 fps for a film look? I’ve never used it before.

The shots are inherently a little grainy, and they look much better if you shrink the shots…I’m toying with the idea of using director to embed the clip to purposly shrink the size so the user cant do a “full screen” on it. Do you know any other ways of making footage cleaner or is magic bullet suit the way to go? Don’t get me wrong, the shots are usable, well lit, but far from broadcast quality.

[Kevin Camp]

well if video for windows works for you, i don’t think there is any problem with it (i actually don’t have that setting, so i don’t know exactly what it’s doing). i can’t think of any reason why the lossless animation codec would change the quality of the output, so i still think there may be something else happening there…. maybe the animation setting was lower than ‘best’ (there is a slider that goes from least to best, but i’ve never changed it from best).

i have heard that magic bullet works very well, but i’ve never used it. if you have dv footage and want to lessen the artifacts a little, ae7 has an effect preset called reduce dv blockiness that can help. if you are keying dv there are a few article/turorials here about keying dv, search the articles for keying and dv (or just keying for other helpful techniques); aharon robinowitz, andrew kramer and barend onneweer have some for ae specificly. just scroll down those pages to see their turotial libraries.

in addition, ae also has some noise or grain removal effects that may help.

personally, i wouldn’t try to go 24p at this point. it will be difficult to recreate the natural motion blur that you would see if the footage was shot at 24p, so it will look a bit jerky or strobe-like.

if you wanted to try it, the smoothest way i’ve found is to make sure the footage is interpretted correctly (selct the footage in the project window, then choose file>interpret footage>main) make sure the separate fields in set to correctly (lower for ntsc dv), you may want preserve edges checked (check it out both ways). then drop it into a 24p (23.976fps) comp and enable frame blending for the comp (the film strip icon) and turn it on in the timeline for your footage (click in the empty box below the film icon 2 times, so it looks like a smooth diagonal line).

you may be able to help smooth the motion by keyframing a little directional blur or with an effect by re:vision called reelsmart motion blur, but i would just wait for your next project and shoot 24p at that point (i’m not familiar with your camera, but many can do this). then you could also look into creating a progressive dvd in encore to avoid having to add the pulldown.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW