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Workaround for QuickTime Renders in AE CC 2018?
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I wouldn’t say it should not be used for video footage, it actually does a great job (and no destructive compression!) However its not the best for playback. You need a really strong computer and graphics card to play back anything of size.
While you can have a keyframe setting other than one, settings other than one can produce pulsing changes like a true compression does. But its a great way to store footage (at least 8bit footage) as long as you use a keyframe distance of 1 (in other words a keyframe every frame) and that way every frame is RLE and completely rebuildable on decode without introducing artifacts. If the footage is noisy you don’t save much in size, but for green screen or mattes the files can be truly microscopic.
However in these days of HD and 4k, 16 and 32 bit comps, log LUTS and raw camera footage, where were trying to tease out every last inch of the gamut, and 8bit format leaves a lot of the data behind. -
[Jan Vork] “For me, it feels like a good old Apple vs Adobe feud. Apple drops Flash, Adobe drops Quicktime.”
These are both old technologies, and today, it’s also true to say that Apple has dropped QuickTime, and Adobe has dropped Flash.
[Jan Vork] “Both were nice formats. For Quicktime Animation/Lossless is no good alternative. It’s quite harsh to have an archive of Quicktime Animation encoded files, which can no longer be imported in After Effects…”
To be perfectly clear, Ae can still read and write Animation-codec MOV files via Adobe’s direct support (though I do not believe that interframe compression is supported). Anything that you rendered in previous versions with the Lossless preset will still import on current releases.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
It should be mentioned here that in the newest versions of AE, Premiere Pro, and AME, you can write ProRes files on Windows natively.
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Just as a note: after a point upgrade in 2018 our QT animation-best capability has returned, and even up on 2019 it’s still there. (on PC)
But walter’s quite right, with the advances in color depth and and codecs that allow more channels and info, the QT formats are long old in the tooth.
Keep in mind too that the camera used for capture can be putting a spin on things compression wise, so as long as you don’t make things worse (for noise or keying etc) these days you don’t neccesarily need an “uncompressed” format for fidelity.
I will miss the RLE size advantages, especially on keys, but I won’t miss the banding when there weren’t enough colours or gamut headroom to go round.
BTW the ffmpeg prores on pc worked a treat! -
In a world were even Animated Gif returned as a popular file format, there are still plenty of jobs where QT lossless is a perfect choice. 2D animations without gradients most of time don’t need 16bpc.
Plus the integrated alpha makes it ideal for prerendered elements. Why not support it? It’s nice and usefull, and there is no alternative that combines lossless compression and alpha channel. Prores4444 comes close, but is a bit overkill in a lot of situations.
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QuickTime Animation codec has always been supported. When Adobe dropped support for export via Apple QuickTime, they added their own first-party support for several popular QuickTime codecs, including Animation, in the very same version.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
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I have an animation-codec QuickTime imported in Ae CC 2019 v16.0.1 right now.
Do you get a specific error message?
Have you tried resetting preferences?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Is it a mac/pc thing? On PC I got QT access back when I changed to 2019. Last poster didn’t indicate which platform.
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[Steve Bentley] “Is it a mac/pc thing? On PC I got QT access back when I changed to 2019. Last poster didn’t indicate which platform.”
Ae CC 2018 supported Animation-codec QuickTime, too. I’m on PCs and we have used Animation extensively throughout the changeover.
As I noted above, some output modules that were based on Apple QuickTime had to be redone to use Adobe MediaCore QuickTime encoders instead, but I promise, the support for a set of formats has been there the entire time.
See here for more:
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/quicktime7-support-dropped.htmlWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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