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Render from After Effects into FCP – interlacing problems
An AE novice here: I am attempting to bring in a quicktime movie render from AE to FCP, but I am having interlacing troubles. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
Here are the settings, for both the render and FCP sequence:
AE Comp: NTSC D1 Pixel
FCP Sequence: NTSC – CCIR 601 / DV
No field order/field dominance for either
720×486 for bothEverything looks good in the comp itself, and the QT movie looks fine as well. The problem occurs when I bring it into FCP, and watch it down on the external monitor – the footage looks stair-stepped. Is there something else I need to select when I am rendering from AE? Considering I don’t have fields selected, and I am rendering with no field, why is this occurring?
As a side note, this is for on-air. I am looking at animations that I have had to previously use which were rendered and delivered from the graphics dept for my network, and they deliver in 720×540, and they look perfect.
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6 Replies
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DV is interlaced lower field so you need to export from AE with fields set to lower.
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Thanks for your response Michael. I should have also stated I am working in Apple ProRes HQ, and as I said field dominance is set to “none” in the FCP sequence, and I did not render animation with interlacing either. So why is interlacing still an issue?
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Sorry, I thought you were working with DV codec. But regardless, standard def is broadcast interlaced so although you are working with animation, your sequence will need to be interlaced for playout to digi beta.
Try setting up a new sequence with fields set correctly (NTSC is lower from memory – I work in PAL). Drop you AE file in and see if that helps. If that isn’t the trick, then try exporting again with fields on, matching the FCP settings. The only monitor to trust is an external.
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Not true.L. If you want progressive, then you leave field render off in AE. DV or 486. Tends to look kinda stobey if you don’t use motion blur. Even interlaced footage will turn out ok as long as AE interpreted it correctly.
If you don’t render with fields (it’s all a single frame to QT) then the frame is interpreted fine either way. Lower or Upper. Doesn’t matter. Because they’re all from the same progressive image. That’s how progressive works in a field based environment. Yes, SD is always playing fields, but the two fields together come from and represent one progressive frame. It’ll play the odd lines, then the even lines or vice versa but it won’t matter because they’re from the same moment in time.
I think the actual problem of stairstepped sounds like it’s not being rendered at best and full quality. Only partially sampled. Check your render settings
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well it’s now 2011, but I think the problem is After effects does something funny. Even though you export something progressive, when you bring it into FCP it thinks it’s interlaced. So if you have NONE set for fields in your FCP timeline. you after effects export is going to looked stepped (like it’s doubled a field to make it work in the non-interlaced timeline). Setting the timeline settings to either upper or lower will make you after effects export look nice again. Only problem is you now have an interlaced timeline – so any FCP transitions etc will be interlaced. (And I hate anything interlaced).
It doesn’t matter what res or codec you export from after effects – it still happens (well I haven’t tried them all)
To fix this issue – I export from After effects and then load it into something like Mpeg streamclip and export it again. (using pro res or animation set to high at both stages means exporting twice shouldn’t matter) but this second export from a different program seems to clear up the interlacing bug.
load the second export into FCP and it should look perfect in your progressive timeline.
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here’s the real fix:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1125270
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