[James Inniani]

It looks like I’ve found the culprit, but I’m still not sure what to do about it. The text layer for “STOP” has both layer styles, motion blur, & layer FX applied, and the trouble is clearly coming from the layer FX, NOT the layer styles. When I toggle the FX off, the layer styles work as they should, but enabling the layer FX causes the weirdness pictured above. It specifically seems to be a glow effect causing the issue. Any idea what’s going on here?

Andrew & Blaise, thanks for the great suggestions. I’ve tried 16-bit and 32-bit, but unfortunately, both give me worse results. It looks like I’ll have to be much more mindful of how I preview my work. I really hate adaptive resolution (silly, I know!), so maybe I’ll just have to toggle between half/full res more often. Really hoping I don’t have to go in and manually copy & paste. 🙁

[James Inniani]

Good point, I totally agree. Unfortunately, I start to run into trouble with certain FX and deeply nested layers, especially if I have motion blur enabled. Ugh, so frustrating. 🙁

[James Inniani]

[Walter Soyka] “I don’t have a 5K iMac to try this on, but may try setting Low Resolution mode on the Ae application file, or using a scaled resolution on your new iMac:”

Great suggestion. Low Resolution Mode ALMOST worked — 50% scale now displays at the size I would expect it to, but unfortunately, setting the resolution to Half results in pixelation. I guess I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Bummer. Pretty tempted to just return this thing so I can stick with my old 21.5″ iMac and just get a laptop or something.

[James Inniani]

[Tero Ahlfors] “The Quicktime Player might use the same scaling tricks it uses for the OS and some other apps to render them out in a bigger size so you don’t need a magnifying glass to read the screen. You could get a full HD monitor and preview your comp with more accuracy with that while working in a larger zoom factor.”

Thanks Tero!

I still have my old iMac, which I may be able to salvage for this purpose. Honestly, though, that would present a number of other issues — I’d quickly run out of desk space and wouldn’t be able to sell the old iMac for parts, and this would also defeat the purpose of having a single, dedicated machine for all of my video/audio work. I’m starting to feel like I just wasted $2k.

Is it at all possible to change the scaling settings within AE to give me what I’m looking for?

[James Inniani]

[Walter Soyka] “Ae is telling you the truth when it says 100% — that’s an accurate, one-to-one, pixel-perfect display of your comp. Your other video app is scaling for convenience, blowing your video up to 200% and hoping you don’t notice the scaling artifacts.
“

Hey Walter, thanks so much for the feedback!

I use QuickTime Player for most video playback. Here’s a screenshot of a 1080p video loaded in QT with the zoom set to “actual size.”

That takes up a pretty substantial amount of screen real estate. I’m not sure why QT would scale up to 200% when set to “actual size,” but it looks like that’s what’s going on here.

If that’s the case, this is going to make editing at 1080p a real drag. I’m used to previewing at 960×540 on a 1080p monitor — this same resolution on a 5K screen is unusably small. But unfortunately, I simply do not have the processing power to be previewing at 100% full res. The new iMac has a 3.2 GHz i5 CPU and 8GB RAM. I intended on maxing out the RAM and was hoping for a more streamlined experience… ugh.

Looks like the only solution will be to work at 100% half res, which is a real bummer. This produces scaling artifacts, which I’ve never had to worry about before. I’m considering returning this iMac and going back to a 21.5″ model with a 1080p monitor, but then I’m limited to 16 GB RAM max.

Thanks Apple!

[James Inniani]

Thanks for the suggestion. Just to clarify – after matching the contrast and luminance, would it make sense to color correct shot 2 to match shot 1 and then grade both? Or should I just grade shot 1 and then match the grading for shot 2? Hope that’s not too confusing!

[James Inniani]

It could have been, but I feel like something like that might be easier to make in some other software.

[James Inniani]

Very good suggestions, Joseph! Found a bunch of useful clips on Pond5. I also had no idea that MBL had that capability, so I’ll definitely demo it out and see what I can accomplish. Thanks!