Stuttering playback/rednering in AE CS4

[Scott paul Dunham]

I’m doing my first AE CS4 work in a long while- and I’m getting the strobe effect on playback, too.

It seems like a setting, however, I’ve already set Preview to skip 0 and full render (quality)… not sure what’s going on… I’m gonna be late with this job, unless I figure this out.

Maybe it will render out fine in the full render queue… I’ll try- but I’d like the preview to be smooth, too.

Scott

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[Ian Mcdaniel]

There’s no pulldown… The source is actually a rendered graphic in AE… Multiple codecs, but since most of these end up on the timeline in FCP, I generally use ProRes or ProRes HQ. This seems to affect all framerates, but not consistently. … The only time this pops up is when I’m against a deadline.

So here’s the process for this particular time I ran into the problem.

Started out with a 1280×720 23.976fps timeline. Made an animation in that timeline. Rendered it out at Best Quality / Pro Res 422 HQ… (although the same issue happens with the Animation codec)

I opened the rendered movie in Quicktime. It plays smoothly. I put it into a 23.98fps timeline in FCP and watched it out of a Blackmagic HD Extreme card via HDSDI into a broadcast monitor… Played perfectly. I then took that same clip into AE (a new comp in the same project that I just rendered from) and when I step frame by frame in the timeline… It will skip random frames… not in a cadence either. It’ll repeat a frame or two, then move on to where it should be… skipping frames of motion. The timeline was derived from the clip (dragged the clip onto the new comp icon)… so the framerate, frame size, time, everything should be exactly the same as the original clip.

Makes no sense. The only thing that I’ve found that seems to clear the issue up is to fire up my old PC I had in the corner and re-render (duplicate) the clip in AE7…the pull it back into the CS4 version.. Or more recently… to render out to an image sequence and re-render the clip that way.

I’m completely stumped. I’ve been using AE since 1997 on an almost daily basis… and I can’t wrap my head around this… unless it’s simply a bug in the software. Older versions of the software seem to handle the clip just fine in the exact same situation.

[Ian Mcdaniel]

Actually this all happens without any interaction with FCP… I was just checking the clip there to make sure it played correctly… which it did. Which made me want to start clawing the screen in anger… since AE couldn’t seem to play that same clip back.

I *did* however try to import the clip into FCP, then export it again… tried the “recompress all frames” button too. Same result. Everything will play the clip except for AE. Even opening it up in quicktime player and stepping frame by frame with the arrow keys… every frame is accounted for. I even rendered timecode onto the clip… It would play every frame in both quicktime and FCP.. but would skip over frames in AE.

Again… it’s not something that always happens… I render several times a day with perfect results… but every once in a while, this creeps up at the worst possible times.