resolution in AE

[Todd Kopriva]

> I have made a animation in AE with photograph in high resolution. If I use this photograph in a small size composition and I nest this compositon in a second High res composition the photograph resolution stays low. This whereas the used source material is of high quality. How is this? The eventual rendering nevertheless use of the imported source material?

It seems that you need to learn about collapsing transformations.

from “Render order and collapsing transformations”
“Collapsing transformations can, for example, preserve resolution when a layer is scaled down by half in a nested composition, and the nested composition is scaled up by a factor of two in the containing composition. In this case, rather than performing both transformations and losing image data in the process, one transformation can be performed—doing nothing, because the individual transformations cancel each other.”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Wim Goossens]

I understand you. What i don’t understand is why this is happening and how to prevent it. I should think that in the final render you alway get the best resulution because the linkt material is high res.

[Stuart Elith]

I don’t think you *fully* understand him, as he has given you the answer… collapse transformations.

Precomping takes whatever is inside and kind of treats it as a new piece of footage (probably not an accurate way of describing it, for various reasons, but it might help you understand the resolution thing). So when you have made a small precomp and put it into a new one, it’s now thinking of that precomp as a piece of footage with its dimensions, NOT as the source file… this is GOOD in many cases, for example it can optimise speed when you’re working with a small section of an asset, but in your case you are noticing the quality loss.

Here’s where Collapse Transformations comes in. Read the help page to see what it does, and then try it out 🙂 It will allow you to get the quality you want in the final render (but it does get tricky when you combine it with 3D stuff and effects, sometimes it takes some wrangling to get what you want without side-effects).

[Wim Goossens]

Thanks for your response, I understand now how a composition takes over the resolution of imported (nested)composition. This is good for rendering. But if you want a high res. still from this composition (for publicing) you got a problem because, in my case the composition is made in PAL.

You refer to help page collapse transformation. Where can I find these?

Here’s where Collapse Transformations comes in. Read the help page to see what it does, and then try it out 🙂 It will allow you to get the quality you want in the final render (but it does get tricky when you combine it with 3D stuff and effects, sometimes it takes some wrangling to get what you want without side-effects).

[Todd Kopriva]

> You refer to help page collapse transformation. Where can I find these?

Follow the link in my previous message.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Stuart Elith]

Regarding creating a high-quality still (for publicity or whatever)…

Remember that it will always come back to the assets you use – if they are high resolution to start with, it’s POSSIBLE to get a high-resolution output.

So lets say you have a still image (of high resolution) which you have used in your Standard Def comp… you are right that if you just render out a frame from this (even if you use Collapse Transformations) it will still be using the SD resolution, which isn’t great.

One option, if ALL your assets are high enough quality, is to make a new comp of a bigger size (you can specify any custom resolution you like) and enlarge it here.
So you could drop your SD comp into a new comp of 2000 x 2000 px (for example) and scale the comp up to fit, then collapse the transformations and the high quality assets will be restored. However, of course any low quality stuff will still be bad. Effects will work with different resolutions so you won’t have a problem with those, but you might find some problems with things like particles – if you just scale up the comp, the solid INSIDE the comp is being scaled, so the particles will scale up correctly but start to look bad (as they are being treated like footage). Sometimes hard to get your head around (and I may have even got it wrong just then!) but it’s worth pushing on with 🙂