[Chris Wright]

PNG only supports 16bpc. Use EXR if you want 32bpc float. Are you premultiplied or straight alpha?
PNG is truecolor up to 48-bit compared to 8-bit 256-color.
Each PNG image will take up like 10-13mb.
Your hard drive could be the culprit. Rendered multiple frames simultaneously might be on.

[Chris Wright]

***If you DO separate fields on source footage, does rendering the output on fields yield the full resolution of the source clip***

You know, I was just about to post about deinterlacing! It seemed everyone was tip toeing around the issue of AE wrecking your video quality if you rendered frames only and it looked like that you have used this method before to get a certain look. Fortunetely, there are much better options than AE for getting that look, which have much better final image quality. Revisionfx has fieldskit to deinterlace 29.97 interlaced to progressive. Magic Bullet has one, as does Algolith. For me, particularly, going from 29i to 23.976p was tricky involving Algolith and twixtor to get 29p then interpolating to 23.976p with the right amount of blur and fluidity you expect in film.

[Chris Wright]

***quicktime converted from the xml data is preconverted to 24P. ***
Don’t you mean 23.976 not 24p?

and AE’s timewarp pixel motion won’t have any stutter, duplicate frames, motion blur, or weird frame blend you might get not using full pixel conversion, but it can be tricky to setup around cuts or transitions.

[Chris Wright]

You only sep. fields if it is interlaced footage, and if so, preserve best edges box is best quality.

If you sep. fields on a progressive clip, you are reducing its quality because AE is trying to sep. fields that don’t exist.

When you render frames only, you are asking AE to deinterlace all your interlaced footage. Progressive is passed along normally in this fashion though.

If you don’t want to lose quality with interlaced video, interpret it as field(dominant upper or lower) and render it out to a new field dominance(most often the same) then you can add pulldown if necessary for NTSC. WWSSW is correct telecine for film to tv, for example.

[Chris Wright]

If the flicker is only in the background, then use a mask feather after you have removed flicker.

deflicker a free excellent flicker remover
https://compression.ru/video/deflicker/index_en.html

There’s other ones like donald graft, tinderbox’s flicker remover, google deflicker might find some more.

[Chris Wright]

Logoaway v4
https://voidon.republika.pl/virtualdub/

or
msu logo remove
https://compression.ru/video/logo_removal/index_en.html

Personally I’ve used logoaway and it is excellent. Haven’t tried msu’s but they make good filters.

[Chris Wright]

this may sound weird but before you delve into beautiful tones and highlights, I recommend you understand color ranges, color models, color gamut, bit depth, video compression, and most of all, color management. What good is color correction, if it all changes once it leaves After Effects and goes to another software program, DVD or uh, FCP. Not to mention even your computer monitor has to be calibrated at gamma 2.2 which most Mac people don’t have as standard, hence the fun world of incompatibility. Googling color space lists them all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Color_space

[Chris Wright]

Could it be 98.75%? I know that is the difference between 29.97 and 23.976. If the audio was crystal synced or digitally synced and you didn’t use a low end tape recorder, then all you have to do is either speed up the audio or slow down the video. Audio changing is the professional way, and less problems than video changing, hence video artifacts from framerate changing.

Hopefully, all you have is a normal 0.1% speed change. Because then you know the exact speed number. If not, line up timecodes from head to tail slates and frame accurate sync in AE by streching audio speed to duration and enabling high quality audio remapping with pitch correction.

*********Techie read article*****

The short version of this tutorial is to use 29.97 fps timecode for video, whether it be regular NTSC, 30P/24P “film look”, or prosumer High Def video.

When shooting actual 24fps or 30fps motion picture, then you have to deal with the 0.1% speed change, so keep your audio at 30fps timecode. Live dialog will end up being slowed down to 29.97 during transfer to video; but sync playbacks will be speeded up from their original 29.97 to 30 fps when played back on the set.

https://www.equipmentemporium.com/Articles/audiosyncplayback.htm

[Chris Wright]

you can render as far as your RAM and AE settings allow. This includes the size of the video, the framerate and the audio. For instance, you can preview way more SD footage than HD.

[Chris Wright]

You could re-create that effect with a simple precomped mask and transform x offset with hue/sat.