[Jeff Rouric]

Hi Dave,

I tried a TIFF sequence, and it almost ate my harddrive, leaving 300mb left, weighing in at 40gigs. 3 minute video. 40 gigs.

MPEG-2 seems to work, so does FLV (but do I really want to edit with FLV? Seems almost like doing it with h.264) but I want to keep trying. I’ll try PNG again. Now to specify, what I did last time was use Media Encoder CS4 to use the Quicktime format on PNG codec, quality 100, everything else same as source. And it came out looking splotchy, pixelated, a bunch of tiles, colors looked like a moire effect.

Maybe if I do it in After Effects instead, as a PNG sequence, instead of just the codec.

Last I checked, PNG is smaller than TIFF, so I’m going to guess it won’t eat my HD.

[Jeff Rouric]

Here’s a list of what I’ve tried so far.

Quicktime PNG Codec (NO, LOSS QUALITY BAD) I forget the size, deleted it.

Quicktime ProRes422 : (SEEMS QUALITY RETAINED, FILE SIZE TRIPLES THOUGH) 2GB

Quicktime Animation (NO, LOST TOO MUCH QUALITY, ALL TILING AND PIXELATED) 5GB

Quicktime Cinepak (NO, SO MUCH QUALITY LOSS THAT IT LOOKS LIKE A 256 GIF PAINTING NOW) 600MB

Quicktime H.264 (NO, BLURRY QUALITY PIXELS) 37MB

Quicktime TIFF Codec (NO, LOST TOO MUCH QUALITY, ALL TILING AND PIXELATED) 10-FRICKEN-GB

Quicktime MPEG-4 VIDEO (NO, BLURRY QUALITY PIXELS, LOOKS LIKE H.264 RESULT) 28MB

Quicktime HDV1080p24 MPEG-2 (WE MIGHT HAVE A WINNER) 600MB

TIFF SEQUENCE (Hasn’t exported yet)

FLV (Hasn’t exported yet)

[Jeff Rouric]

Hi guys, thanks for the answers, literally pulling my hair out at this. I’m glad Adobe Media Encoder (I’m running CS4, my client probably has CS5) can encode MTS, though now I don’t know what to export to.

I tried PNG, there was so much loss in the quality that I can’t run with that. Same with h.264

I also tried ProRes, and it doubled the size so one 3 min file was 1GB. BUT it was also the wrong size. I’m running a new queue for a good size one.

I’m also currently exporting a bunch of other formats/codecs like…

TIFF sequence
Animation
MPEG2
Cinepak
HDV1080p24

Here’s some more BG info because I need to be able to work on these faster and figure adding details will help you guys help figure out the right format…

These are slo-mo photography shoots, against a greenscreen. 1080 x 1920, NO AUDIO, to be played back on an HD picture frame. Basically in the final product, there will be 10 seconds from 2 (up at the same time, next to each other) or so from each, before fading into another set. Each set has a greenscreen that must be keyed out, so quality needs to stay intact. And even though we were only trying to render out like 20 seconds, it was still going to take a few hours. So I figured “we have to transcode this to something”

Or are we better off staying with MTS?

Each final “video” is going to be 10 seconds (out of the much longer source clip) however, we can’t just export the 10 secs he wants from each video to use in AE, that would be too easy, because he needs to see how each one looks next to each other. So that’s out.

Also, I’m not even sure what settings I have to set for the export, like field order, frame rate, all that. Normally I’d just match this to the source file, but I have no idea what the source file’s settings even are. VLC says frame rate is some weird number like 46.343439 or something.

[Jeff Rouric]

Hey Nick, no worries, native format is not H264, thank god. I just converted to 640×480 h264 for a proxy format, one that can be edited with little file size impact. It’s what I always do. Then once the editing of the crap quality footage is done, I make a new sequence with native settings, reconnect it to the good, unconverted footage, clear any distortion settings, and export.

For the future, what is a better proxy format to use that’s as small as h264, and can still be reconnected no problem?

And so I guess if I can’t multiclip this project anymore I’ll just have to gang sync it….

[Jeff Rouric]

Ah, it is H264. I knew there’d be problems but nothing like this. I just figured the quality would be off/dropped frames maybe in the export. But I don’t care about quality here as I’m going to online the footage back to native format at the end, and this is just an offline rough cut.

Any way I could get away with the multiclip thing under h264? It’s been working so far…

[Jeff Rouric]

Ack so stupid, I just figured out a better way. Your ideas about expressions gave me more ideas. Now this is how I’m doing it for anyone looking on

– Create comp (ReflectText)

– In text layer > source : use an expression “value = thisComp.name”

Now the name of the composition the text is in will be exactly what the text says.

– Do the necessary matting in ReflectText

– Now it’s a template to use over and over again.

– Duplicate the comp in the project window and rename it a new lyric.

– Once a verse is done and synced with music, cut the layers and put them into the ColoredText comp, then put that comp at the point where the words should start.

Now you just have to worry about where to put them and time remapping.

Cheers

[Jeff Rouric]

Hey Tero, thanks but I don’t think that’s the problem. I was tired and could barely explain it last night, so today I made this short video outlining the problem. The text is supposed to show up and disappear at EXACTLY the timecode it says, and it does when it’s being played in the workspace, but it is off by a frame upon render.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jftfnx_h4&feature=youtu.be

And here is a pic of the workspace, maybe you see something…these are usually screen caps from Quicktime Player, maybe there’s something wrong with those kinds of clips.

https://i.imgur.com/Ofahbrk.png

Thanks

View post on imgur.com

[Jeff Rouric]

Hi Jimmy,

I think you can do this by having the browser as the active window and then hit Cmd F, which opens the Find dialog where you can search for clips with certain text elements. You can even specify certain fields to look in which is what I think you want.

And if that doesn’t work, you could select everything in the browser and export a batch list, then open the batch list in your favorite spreadsheet program and it will appear as a spreadsheet with each metadata field as a column.

I personally like to name all my clips LOCATION_CAMERAANGLE_WHATITIS_CU/MS/WS (Some other parameters sometimes but you get the idea.) But I’m waiting on the community to tell me if I’m wrong to do so or not.

Cheers!

[Jeff Rouric]

Thanks so much Brian! Seeing it in video makes it so much simpler. But I don’t understand just what’s going on with the whole parenting and holding alt thing. You think you could try to explain what’s making this work?

Also, when I used this method right now to make a little ring of 12 black solids, that worked fine, but when I tried replacing the footage of “black solid” with a video clip, it worked, but the ring became a spiral that heads upward.

I looked at the numbers on the anchor points and position and they haven’t changed from what the ring was, so is this a glitch or something?