[Michael Duff]

the video quality shouldnt be less …. maybe check a few things:

are you interpreting the footage correctly in AE. Right click on the footage in the project window and go “interpret footage” – make sure the field order is correct.

are you viewing the in Full quality in AE?

is Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction on in AE? If so, it will look a little pixelated…. check the manual if you’re not sure what this is

maybe as a test, do an uncompressed render out of AE and compare the two in Premiere …..

try these and if you’re still stuck post again with some more details …

good luck

[Michael Duff]

so you are actually doing a RAM preview (hitting 0 on the keypad) rather than just hitting space bar? you need to hit 0 on the keypad, wait for it to render into RAM, you’ll see the green bar building, when it has done as much as it can it will play back… sometimes you need to let it play through a couple times before it plays in real time.

does this help?

[Michael Duff]

could you be a bit more specific about the effect you are creating? do you know of any similar clips to use as a reference?

cheers

[Michael Duff]

hmmm not that I’m aware of … maybe flash is a better option for the types of animation you are doing? for me, I’m the opposite, if I try to do something in Flash it takes me ten times as long as AE….

hopefully someone else may know some other workflow shortcuts that may help

[Michael Duff]

or right click on a keyframe and you can “Select all following keyframes” or “Select all previous keyframes” …. very handy

[Michael Duff]

I’d suggest just working your way through some of the basic tutorials here at the cow … I use AE to do all my border/vignette effects just because I find it easy to use… if you were just doing stills (like a tacky picture frame or something) you could just make it in PS and then use any NLE to comp it on……

after you pick up some more of the basics of AE then I’m sure you’ll be fine … or at least you’ll have questions about more specific effects …

hope this helps

[Michael Duff]

The Null needs to be the Parent of the photos ….

create a null, then select all the layers that are photos, then for those layers that you’ve just selected you need to choose the Null layer from the parent drop down box ….. or just drag the little spiral icon to the Null Layer ….

then if you scale or move the Null, all the photos will change too!

[Michael Duff]

… how long (duration) is the project? 50G is pretty big for one video clip … maybe you don’t need to be rendering the entire program? or maybe you dont need to use a lossless codec?

[Michael Duff]

so a wmv rendered out of exactly the same comp doesn’t play squished? if that’s the case then maybe be a piece of data is written into the file that tells it the pixel aspect ration – then windows media player maybe adjusts to suit…. that’s just a guess though.

for us wmv files always display squished, but we are on macs using flip4mac.

I’d stick to the AVI files that display squished and just explain it to the client.

[Michael Duff]

no, its not to do with the how it’s encoded it’s that the pixels are actually rectangular … when you look at it on your NLE, or television it will look correct.
maybe read up on:

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/pixel_madness/

what is the final format for this project? is it going to TV? or staying on the computer or web? if it’s only ever going to be seen on a computer then you shouldn’t be working in rectangular pixels to begin with …

or if you just want to do a render that looks correct on a computer, in the render queue go to output module, then select stretch, then set the dimensions to 720×405. This will squish it back down to look correct on the PC, but don’t use this to publish to broadcast.

If none of this makes any sense at all, spend a bit of time googling around and searching the COW. Once you get your head around square and non-square pixels it will all become clear.. good luck!