[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks Ridley and Walter for the great suggestions and info. I have looked into getting a refurbished mac and the drawback for me was the lack of fusion drive for the older iMac. But seeing that it really wouldn’t have a huge impact on AE performance I will definitely look into the option of getting a refurbished mac. Thanks again for the quick responses.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks John for the help. I have continuously rasterize checked and everything is good until I scale it and then make it 3D. The only way it does not go blurry is if I leave the vector scale at 100%. If I scale it up (or down) and then check 3d it goes slightly blurry. Renderer is classic and motion blur is off.

I’ve concluded that as long as I don’t scale the vector I won’t lose any sharpness.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks for the help. I think I’ve found the issue. When checking the scale of the AI file I was actually looking at the opacity. The file was scaled to 300% and, after resizing it in Illustrator and then importing back into After Effects, I discovered that it was the rescaling which was causing it to go blurry. But why wouldn’t a vector be able to scale?

Thanks again for the help.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Some additional info:

There is no camera. I’m working on a macbook 2GHz with 4GB on os 10.6.8. The comp is 720×1280 and only has two layers; a white solid background layer and the Illustrator layer. The Illustrator shape is set to 100% for the size and my preview is at 100%. Everything looks great until I switch on 3D and then it goes blurry.

Also, when I render out the comp (both with 3D checked and unchecked) the layer still ends up blurry when 3D is checked.

I’ve probably had this happened before, but just now noticing.

Thanks again.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Great! Thanks for the recommendation.

Jason

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks Michal and Kevin. Michal – I got your suggestion to work. Turned up “Error Threshold” all the way and then turned down “Block Size” and then also checked “Build From One Image” and it reduced the artifacts quite a bit.

Kevin – thanks for the explanation on the motion blur. I have heard a little of reelsmart and I’ll have to check it out and see if I can get a better result and also see if I can render out a motion vector out of Blender.

Thanks Again for the help.
Jason

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Figured out the video aspect ratio. Just clicked the ‘Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction’ button and fixed it.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Got home and checked the video on VLC and it does show as 60i and it very much looks interlaced in VLC. So, AE was interpreting correctly.

On a side note, in VLC it also shows the size as being as 1440 x 1080 (doesn’t show aspect ratio). However, when I drag it to make a new comp in AE it creates a preset comp of ‘HDV 1080 29.97 (1440 x 1080)’ with a pixel aspect ratio of ‘HDV 1080/DVCPRO HD 720 (1.33),’ but the video looks squished and looks 4:3. If I manually change the comp to 1920×1080 with square pixels aspect ratio it fits and looks great. So, again I’m confused. Is it 1440 or 1920? I mostly just work with 720 so it hasn’t been that big of an issue (I just drag it in and fit to comp…looks great). Just gets confusing.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks again for the help. I’ll have to check my camera and see if it encoded it as 30 or see if there is an additional setting that I need to set or if it just records 24 as 30. It’s an older Canon (HG10) and it does a very good job although I’ve had some difficulties with the AVCHD codec and FCE.

[Jason Schoenfeld]

Thanks Ben and Kevin. I’ve gone through the video and there’s no interlacing at all. I’ll check to see if there are duplicate frames every 5th frame. Also, what is meant by “shot 24p, but recorded 30p?”