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Question – Motion Blur really affecting graphics quality
Hi,
I’m new to the forum and Adobe After Effects, pretty much. Unfortunately for me I’ve had to quickly become used to it as a client wants an effect or three in a project that After Effects the best suited to accomplish. This forum has helped me so much thus far!
The first of many questions, I’m sure concerns the automatic motion blur. I’m having a problem where once the composition has stopped moving on-screen it takes about 15 frames to regain its quality.
I’m rendering the best possible quality of FLV I can out (Lossless etc) and for the most part the graphic sharpness and colour looks pretty good. Then there is a big flurry of motion before the last frame of the movie in which the graphic object sits static, but despite there being no more motion it looks absolutely horrible – like a JPG compressed down to about 40%!
I guess I’ve put this down to the motion blur having some effect coupled with my choice of file-type-render, but when I import the FLV into Flash I now have to put in a line of code telling it to move on and stop about 20 or so frames after the movement has finished to get back to the quality. Is there something I’m doing wrong, or a setting I have unchecked or is this just the way of things?
Sorry for writing so much on a simple question, but my brain has been fried from working all weekend on this and I want to make sure that I’ve explained the problem in as much detail as possible (which I probably haven’t!) Hope someone can help, thanks for your time 🙂
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5 Replies
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if you do a ram preview in ae, do you see the same problem?
if not, my guess is that you are seeing an artifact from temporal compression, where the codec is using compression keyframes to keep the file size down. the compression keyframes are probably set to every 15-20 frames, so you are seeing the codec deciding that the information between the last frame of the move and the next compression keyframe 15-20 frames later stays the same, so it doesn’t change the image.
you might try rendering to a lossless animation mov, then take that into a compression utility to create the flv using mullti-pass (2-pass) encoding. adobe media encoder should do this, as will many other compression utilities. this should give you the best possible compression and image quality.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Wow, what a great response! No I don’t see it in a RAM preview, it’s just fine. Thank you very much for being so expansive on this issue, Kevin, I’ll get onto to trying that right away. Many thanks 🙂
Alex
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Hi, sorry to have another question off the bat so soon. When you say a ‘lossless animation mov’ do you mean something specific like a Quicktime .mov or just anything that takes my fancy?
I also just came across another very strange thing when I accidentally rendered out my composition as an AVI and not a Flash from AE. The AVI looked fab, as it should at lossless setting, BUT it was 329MB in size.
The project I’m working on takes me through two steps: I screen-capture using Camtasia, save as .camrec then process and export out the .camrec as an AVI for compositing and editing in After Effects. What has me puzzled is that the last screen capture (1000 x 912, 22 seconds long) exported out as an AVI from Camtasia was just 2.59MB big. Yet the render AVI of the same screen capture sequence from After Effects at smaller dimensions and less length was a massive 329MB! What gives? :O
Thanks in advance for any help and sorry if I’m asking questions that have been answered many times, but I do usually try and search beforehand to see if anyone has similar issues.
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[Alex Mann] “When you say a ‘lossless animation mov’ do you mean something specific like a Quicktime .mov or just anything that takes my fancy?”
i was referring to a quicktime file with lossless animation as the codec, but, yes any lossless or uncompressed file (like an uncompressed avi) would be just as good.
[Alex Mann] “What has me puzzled is that the last screen capture (1000 x 912, 22 seconds long) exported out as an AVI from Camtasia was just 2.59MB big. Yet the render AVI of the same screen capture sequence from After Effects at smaller dimensions and less length was a massive 329MB! What gives?”
avi is just a container, not a codec… meaning you can have an avi that is uncompressed (very large files) or and avi that is compressed (dv, cinepak or any number of compressed codecs). my guess is that camtasia is capturing with a compressed codec to an avi file, while the avi rendered from ae was uncompressed.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Once again – thank very much for your help, Kevin 🙂
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