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Poor Quality Renders And Playback
This has to be something super simple I’m overlooking. I am working on an HDV 960 x 720 29.97 sequence with HDV source footage, some of which has been keyed in AE and rendered out with the animation codec.
Here is the problem. When the play head is stopped in the timeline, footage is “paused”, it looks great, blacks are back, lines are crisp and it’s artifact free. As soon as I play the footage in the timeline, or, render out a quicktime (not a quicktime conversion, just straight quicktime) it looks like the quality is dropped substantially. The blacks turn a grey, like the contrast was brought way down. I get awful blocky artifacts in the keyed footage, not in the edges, but in the footage, especially the blacks (like blocks of pixels shifting location on every frame).
I have to be missing something totally obvious, but I’m on a tight deadline and can’t figure it out. Thanks so much for any help!
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5 Replies
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Animation? You are trying to play back the ANIMATION codec? That isn’t an editing codec. It requires a LOT of drive horsepower to play back, and even then, it won’t do it sharply. Gotta convert to an FCP codec.
#2 Blurry Playback
Shane’s Stock Answer #2: Blurry/Low Quality playback
ONLY JUDGE THE QUALITY OF YOUR MATERIAL ON AN EXTERNAL BROADCAST MONITOR, OR AT LEAST A TV.
The Canvas shows you what happens after the codec you are working with has been applied. The Viewer shows you the material in its native format. Once you drop the footage from the Viewer into the timeline, it inherits the attributes of the sequence. If it is a DV sequence, the footage will render out as DV.
1. Disable overlays on the Canvas.
2. Make sure you’ve rendered everything (no green bars at the top of the timeline).
Video playback requires large amounts of data and many computations. In order to maintain frame rate and be viewable at a normal size, only about one-fourth of the DV data is used in displaying the movie to the screen. However, the DV footage is still at full quality, and is best viewed thru a TV or broadcast monitor routed thru your camera or deck.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Shane, thanks so much for your reply. Sorry for the confusion in my post, the AE keys were exported using the animation codec, however they were converted to HDV as well as the other media inside Final Cut. I checked out Shane’s Stock Answer #2 before posting, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. I only say that because the sequence renders out the same low quality that I have in the timeline. It makes sense that playback might be lower quality, but I don’t understand why the renders are coming out the same way. Thanks again.
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You don’t understand how HDV is lower quality than Animation? How your nice ANIMATION file that is crisp, now looks like poo when you render it as HDV? HDV is a sucky codec. Horrid. Deplorable. If you want it to look good, render it out as ProRes, work in a ProRes timeline, and use your HDV in that ProRes timeline, and render when done. Unless you are ouptutting back to HDV. Then there’s nothing you can do. Poo is poo.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] “Poo is poo.”
Quote of the month!
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I like poo is poo. Well maybe that’s just the issue. I unfortunately am stuck having to finish this project in HDV. I’ve worked with HDV in the past, I just can’t believe the keys would look that suckish, I mean I know HDV is one the worst formats to key, but, oh well, thanks so much for the help.
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