[Alik Griffin]

Hey Shawn,
Years have gone by since your original post but I thought I’d update my findings. I’ve had this problem for years. Animators would give me a panning shot of stills or comps, left to right, or right to left and it would always get these little jitter or skips.

I work for a game trailer agency and even some of our game capture that has smooth left to right pans or bullet time (when the shot is frozen in time) gives this stutter effect when encoded or brought into final cut. My only guess is it seems to be a codec thing. When I play it back ram preview in AE uncompressed, it’s always fine or better, the second I go to Final cut or any compressed codec like PRORES HQ or 444, dvcproHD it stutters. It always plays back better when using quick preview out of Finder and it plays especially crappy in the quicktime application. You can see a sample with this trailer. Check out the first shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IJ4qLuyCqU

Here are a two things I’ve discovered that mildly help the problem for animation in AE.

1. Using the scrolling credits concept. Make sure the shots origin moves in a multiple of whatever your frame rate is. Or something like that.

You can use this expression on your position. Change rate to adjust speed.

rate = 6; //value in px/sec.
if (marker.numKeys > 0){
if (time > marker.key(1).time){
value – [rate*timeToFrames(time-marker.key(1).time),0];
}else{
value;
}
}else{
value – [rate*timeToFrames(time-inPoint),0];
}

It seems to help a little but not completely.

2. I know Perian was giving mac codecs problems awhile ago. Uninstall it. It helped me a little with stutter awhile ago.

3. Make sure your frame rates are consistent all around. 24 frames per second is not the same as 23.98. So if in AE you’re working on a shot that is 23.98 and your sequence is 24fps it could possibly generate very slight stutter problems.

My Conclusions:
I’m still stumped and am working on a project that is giving me this problem.

I would love to hear if anyones ever come up with a reason why smooth pans or dollies on still or almost still images creates a stutter.

I’ve tried a million things to try to vary pixels slightly, using lens warps, comping smoke, trying double frame rates before encoding. (So rendering out at 48fps and doing the final encoding at 24) Deflicker in FCP. Nothing seems to help.

I’m totally stumped and can only think that it’s a video playback issue that has to do with our 3d cards trying to decode the codecs. Or maybe a monitor refresh rate thing?

It always plays better in AE, and decent in and Finders quicklook. Everywhere else seems to generate a stutter. Especially going to H264. The strange thing is the stutter doesn’t happen consistently at the same spot. It’s variable stutter and is unique every time it’s played.

Alik Griffin
http://www.AlikGriffin.com

[Alik Griffin]

I’m having all these problems.
I have the new 2009 Model MacPro. It has 16 Gigs of ram. 8x2G sticks all from the same manufacturer all installed correctly.

I can’t get long ram previews, and I’m using a Kona card to go out to a SD color accurate monitor, and can’t get full frame playback.
I’ve tried with the black magic card, I get like 8 frames a second. Then switched to the Kona LHi and get like 18. It doesn’t make sense to me that I can’t get full frame play back from AE to my preview monitor with these cards. Isn’t that what they are designed for?
Final Cut lets works perfectly down scaling 720p to the 480 monitor.

I can however get full frame playback when I turn off my preview to the cards and just run it in the AE window. I also have the OpenGL settings turned off. Not sure what to do? is AE CS4 just a lemon? Everyone seems to have problems with it.

All I want is Longer Ram previews like in CS3. And I hate waiting 2 minutes for the ram preview to start and I want to be able to see the ram preview through my external color monitor. What can I do?

Alik Griffin
http://www.AlikGriffin.com