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Premiere pro-After effects render engine
At NAB in 2007 I spoke with an Adobe project manager about the marked difference in the rendering quality between premiere pro and after effects. When comparing the same movement, or corner pin, or 3d move between the 2 programs on DV NTSC outputs, the difference is striking. AE is light years ahead in terms of sub-pixel interpolation, whereas premiere suffers from consistent “pixel-jumps” and overall low quality interpolation. If you will notice, in premiere pro, if you move a clip up or down one pixel the image quality will suffer drastically, you must move it on exact 2 pixel boundaries to keep quality.
The Adobe rep said that all of those differences would be removed in CS3 and that ppro and AE would share an identical render engine. I have been using and tweaking both of the CS3 programs and still see no difference in the poor quality of premiere output. Is there a series of hidden or obscure settings that need to be activated or tweaked to achieve similar quality?
I apologize for placing this in the AE forum, but I am going to place it in both to get a broader exposure to the issue.
thanks
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2 Replies
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Absolutely agreed, one only has to do a camera perspective or page peel in PP3 to see that it won’t work 🙂
Not sure if he was trying to sell you on an upgrade, or if that plan was put back on the shelf.
Of course, Premiere is an editor, not a motion graphics application, so asking it to deal with motion the same way AE does may be a little unfair, and in fact may in the process create more load than it needs…
Vince
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This is quite true and I’m quite surprised people aren’t up in arms about it more. Than again most people learned their lesson long ago and switched to Final Cut. Anyhow…
I’m using CS4 and a simple example of the poor Premiere rendering is this:
I had a a VERY simple need:
1) insert a title card made in Photoshop at the beginning
2) insert 3 lower thirds later down the timeline
Easy right?
Well, I was to upload this video on YouTube.
The specs are for standard def: 640×480. They recommend one of the formats as Mpeg2. So, this is what I did. Yes, I had progressive set, and there was no squashing etc.
Anyhow, the title card is just atrociously rendered. However…turn that sequence into an After Effects sequence and render it FROM After Effects to Mpeg2 and the graphic is totally clean. However! If you render that AE sequence from Premiere…same problem.
And the problem doesn’t stop there. You say to yourself: Fine I’ll just re-render these parts from After Effects. Guess what? Titles aren’t supported from Premiere into After Effects. They instead turn into screen filling black solids. How useful. Soooo…now I have to re-create the lower thirds in After effects…just for the stupid title card.
I didn’t even mention the stalling that occurs between the two programs. Want to double click the text layer in AE? Well, prepare to wait as all kinds of BS goes on in the CPU background. Oh, super…the hand is a weird twitchy mouse cursor/hand/hour glass aberration while Premiere and After effects “dynamically” communicate.
I for some damned reason have been loyal to Premiere simply because I like the “idea” of seamlessly switching between Premiere and After Effects. What you really end up with is one program (premiere) that completely fails on the graphics front, even their linear wipe sucks while on the other hand (after effects) you end up with a program that completely sucks with audio and basic editing. Want to do a simple fade to white between two clips. Hope you set some time aside…
Anyhow, Adobe, you didn’t just drop the ball…you’ve let roll into a ditch off the side of the road
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