Video preview output on a Laptop

[Troy Murison]

I use the FW output on my laptop for previews with clients when I go to them
but I caveat them as to the output not being what they’ll see on final render
because we see not-so-good quality on the FW previews. My clients don’t seem to
mind in my case as they understand it’s miraculous that I can bring the
power to bear that I can to their site. I do wish the FW preview output
quality was a little better though! Doesn’t seem to matter what I’m
working on (footage, text only, etc.) or what machine (desktop/laptop)
FW output is all kinda lousy looking. Not sure how else to explain it or
if there’s a solution we haven’t found. ??

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Steve Roberts]

[Troy Murison] “FW output is all kinda lousy looking.”

It’s because the output is DV-compressed, and DV is lousy looking. It doesn’t work well with graphics. 🙂

Steve

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

But DV via FW e.g. with FCP on a Mac look stunning compared to what I see via FW direct out of AE. DV has its drawbacks, sure but not to the extent that explains the picture quality I get. Maybe I

[Troy Murison]

I realize that it is compressed, but what we see (across multiple systems) is much
worse looking than ‘regular’ DV output. Even just looking at the same footage you can
look at in PPro/Avid on the same FW based monitoring system looks very bad in comparison.
Once it’s rendered and then played back on Avid/PPro, it looks fine. It’s just the
FW preview in AE that’s bad. Doesn’t matter if your settings/quality switches are all
in their ‘best’ mode either. It isn’t unusable or anything, just not as good as it
should be, IMO.

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Austin Wallender]

Is your comp 720×480? If your comp is720x486, it will get resized and make it look even worse than before. I usually drop my D1 comp in a 720×480 comp for ram-previews… (clipping 6 fields).

[Troy Murison]

It doesn’t seem to matter too much what the comp size is in my case.
I do a lot of both and I don’t really see too much difference between
the 480 v. 486. They both are kinda bad looking.

Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle