Problems with Renders From AE to Premiere

[Mark Whitney]

First, make a note of what your project settings that are working for you in Premiere are. You don’t mention any sort of capture hardware so I guess your working via Firewire and DV files of some flavor. Maybe create a fresh project using the default Preset that matches your system and then look at the Project Settings to see what it’s using. Do those match your actual project? Particularly note the codec it defaults to. When you bring a clip in to a layer in a new timeline, does it require a preview render? That’s the red horizontal line at the top of your timeline when the Enable Previews option is On. The clips that don’t are using a codec your system is best set up for and are usually just gray or green. Check the files properties to see the codec it’s using.

Next, make sure your AE comp size matches your Premiere project in resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, field order, etc. When rendering, make sure your the best settings & that everything matches of course and pick the codec that Premiere prefers. I’m surprised you had issues with the Quicktime using Animation codec, so I suspect something else was amiss.

If your animating text, you might consider simply rendering to sequential tga’s. You then have the choice of using the rendered image or just the alpha.

Hope that helps.

Mark

[Robert Sanchez]

Mark, I’ve tried your suggestions and unfortunatley have not reached a solution. I checked the project settings for both programs, and they both have the same rez, frame rate etc. I do see the red render bar over the AE avis I bring into Premiere however. The majority of my footage is miniDV and beta, not firewire files.
I thought the seq targa’s would have definatley worked, but that also gave the same result. I’ve even tried to import the AE comp into Premiere and render it out that way, same problem.
I have dual monitors in my workspace including a 4:3 television monitor. The TV monitor gives me a clean read on the graphs where the computer monitor is where I’m experiencing the problem. My projects are mostly for the web, so I’m trusting the comp monitor more than the TV. Am I right for assuming this? I’ve asked a few counterparts and they either haven’t experience this or had a solution. Anything else come to mind?

Sorry it took me so long to respond, I’ve had other projects around the office that had priority.

[Mark Whitney]

That is pretty odd. It’s probably something simple but just being overlooked.

I’m trying to think of some tests that would isolate where the issue lies. In other words, is it with AE output or something in Premiere? Evaluating output on it’s intended medium is generally the best approach.

Is your output from Premiere clean to begin with when you simply have a track of footage w/o effects, titles, etc.? If not, then it doesn’t matter if the AE output is good or not. If it is clean out of Premiere then you can probably focus on an output setting in AE.

Jittery, I’m thinking there’s a field order, frame rate, or interlacing issue going on, but grainy tells me there’s something going on with output size or codec.

Good luck. Wish there was more I could offer to check.

Mark