[Andrew Donaldson]

Yeah, I used to work in broadcast and had problems then too. Which is when i do my classic swerve manouevre… “nah, you don’t want pure red, what about trying something else..?”

It really seems like some sort of basic 101 of video that I seem to have skipped.

Nevin, i have tried to reduce the saturation on the red but it only starts to look good when it becomes properly pink! not a client pleaser.

I will give your suggestions a go Dave, Thanks alot.

Andrew.

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hi Darby,

Baseline profile is a feature of H264 encoding, which doesn’t seem to be supported by alot of Android tablets (crazy i know), which is why we are using FFmpeg as a blanket solution for all OS’s.

The powers at be now tell me it an Operating System problem, and its nothing to do with our encoding.
It still leaves me a bit peeved when customers complain about our videos messing everything up.

Thanks for all the replies!

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hi Juan, thanks for your reply,

We use the original iPad to do most of our testing so i don’t think it can be that.
the animations are usually only a few seconds long (10s max usually), and the video has to be as sharp as the text articles as possible, hence the high bit rate. since its only a few seconds most render out at 5Mb or so, so the magazine aint too big really.

The frame size was given to me by the designers who make all the rest of the content. To be honest ive never really questioned it! its looks good when we play it, so i haven’t really needed to test other frame sizes (except full HD, but that would make even bigger files).

Thanks for your reply. Still no real answer to why they don’t play well on some peoples devices.

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hey Mike, thanks for your reply.

Most of our video content is downloaded with the app. So the network speed wouldn’t have an effect on the playback speed.

funnily enough the videos in the magazine that do stream, playback just fine!

Thanks for the link, I’ll go have a read now…

[Andrew Donaldson]

Yeah, to be fair, I did find that rendering out uncompressed from AE and then compressing to H264 in AME didn’t give me any better results.

But i do understand that stand alone apps (like the suggestions made by Roland that I will defo check out) will yield better results because that’s what their main aim is!

Cheers guys!

oh, and for what its worth I rendered out my movie at 15Mbs 2pass VBR, keyframing every 12 frames, H264 and the client still wasn’t really happy with the quality!

[Andrew Donaldson]

Thanks for your replies guys.

To be honest, i think its a bit of a fruitless quest, really.
I think that being on the iPad the client is expecting the detail in the fonts, etc. to look as sharp in the video as they do on the hi res pages throughout the feature.
And i know that however good you are at compressing your video it will never be as sharp as a high res photoshop image. sadly.

Thanks for the reminder about AME, I had actually forgotten all about that!

Andrew-

[Andrew Donaldson]

Does it still look jagged at 100%?

Having the composition window at 100% will give a better idea of how it will render out.

[Andrew Donaldson]

Boom! the Beam Effect!

two birds with one stone there! It looks like the toComp experssion is what im after, and Ive found a new site – greymachine.com looks nice!!

Thanks guys!

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hey Dan,

Ive figured out what was going wrong.

My camera was inside one of the precomps, and although I never really started out to have a camera nested inside a precomp, it just kinda evolved that way.
I took a few minutes to re-jig the whole thing and the expression worked fine. I think it needed me to step back from it to sort it out.

Thanks for your time.

Andrew.

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for that, but its still not really what im looking for.

The detail in the reflection is not really what i want. All the methods of casting reflections seem to be duplicates of the original comp that stick to the original. This isn’t realistic. because a real reflection is the opposite of the object being reflected.
Ideally, when an item is lifted up away from the floor, the reflection moves in the opposite direction. But almost all the methods I come across make the reflection stick to the original.

the method i used at the start of this post was pretty much spot on, apart from the weird axis thing i mentioned.

Its still a little baffling, but i might have to either forget the reflection completely or hope no-one notices that the one camera move causes an opposite reflection.

Thanks for taking the time to reply though.

Andrew.

ps, the link wasn’t in my original post:

https://vimeo.com/33775625