Why do I loose so much quality?

[Jimmy Brunger]

Can you be more specific?!?

Do you have pixel aspect ratio switch on? Do you have it set to best or draft quality? Are you viewing at full resolution at 100%? Sorry if I’m being rude, but have you ever used After Effects before?

AE7 Pro – Nucleo – Mocha v1.0.1 – PS CS3 – FCP 5
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[John Isaacks]

Hi am not offending by your questions, i have used after effects before but I am not a professional.

the video reolution is 1680 x 1050 (the same as my screen) its 40 seconds long. The original .avi is only 30MB so it must be really compressed although it looks great, I import the video into a new after effects project, drag it into the composotion button to create a new compisition, I then render the movie without changing anything, my render settings are set to “Best Settings” and my output module is set to “Lossless”. after rendering the video the new video size is 40GB and looks terrible, its very jumpy and appears as if pixels from different frames are mixing in together and overlapping.

as far as pixel aspect ration, I have not changed anything so whatever the dfault is, but after its rendered that shouldn’t matter anyways right?

THANKS!!

[Frank Thomas]

What codec was used to compress the original clip? If you’re not sure, download Gspot to check it.

[John Isaacks]

I believe it was “Microsoft Video 1”

[John Isaacks]

should I be using a different program than “CamStudio” to capture my screen video?

[Brendan Coots]

Camtasia Studio works great, that’s not your problem. The file format you chose for it to output to is more likely the culprit here.

Do a quick test – In Camtasia, set it to output a Quicktime Animation Codec movie and do a brief capture. The file size per second of footage will probably be very close to that of your AVI, but the file will be much more compatible with AE and other applications. Once you have this “test” Animation codec file, treat it exactly as you did before in AE – import it, drag to make new comp icon, then render it out and see if the quality takes a dive. Just make sure you are using the “Add to Render Queue” method of rendering, not the File>Export. If you’re unsure about this, post back and I’ll give you the info needed. Here again, the format After Effects outputs the movie to will greatly affect quality. Since you plan to put it on your web site, your options get a little limited. FLV or h.264 might be good options here, with a bitrate around 1600kbps and a frame rate of 15fps.

There is another problem here, however, that is much greater than anything mentioned so far. Since you are capturing at 1680×1050, you are probably going to need to scale the video down for viewing unless your visitors will be downloading the video to their local computer. Even then, 1680×1050 is huge. You will probably want to halve that. if you simply scale it down in After Effects, it will turn to mush for reasons beyond the scope here.

The preferred approach is to lower your screen resolution while capturing, ideally to 800×600. You could post a video this size online and it would fit okay in most people’s browser windows, but you may want to crop it down even smaller. To do this, you would set up a composition that is maybe 600×400 or however large you think your final video should be. Use After Effects to crop and “Pan and scan” on your capture so that you never have to scale it up or down, you are simply moving it around to focus on what is being shown. This will give you a web video that fits in a browser window as people will expect, retains its quality very well and is a much smaller file size. The main point here is that you do NOT want to scale the video at any point, including your final output, if at all possible. Doing so will destroy quality.

Once it’s compressed for the web using FLV or h.264, it will lose some quality, that’s just unavoidable. But using the technique above, you should be able to retain as much quality as possible.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[John Isaacks]

@ Brendan Coots

Thank you very much I was using CamStudio not Camtasia, I downloaded the demo for Camtasia and it works much better.

The quality in After Effects was superb, I did lose more quality than I would like though after exporting the flv from After Effects.

Thanks!!!