Keith Fredericks
Forum Replies Created
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Not sure what I just did, but I think I replied incorrectly somehow.
Anyway, thank you Alex for helping me. Exactly what I was looking for.
Sometimes a fire extinguisher catches fire.
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Not sure if Cleaner or FCP allow you to scale your video to that resolution, or which application used to set those dimensions. And although it is optimal to scale in halves (640,320,160…480,240,180), I don’t understand why it would look THAT bad. Squeeze lets you do whatever dimensions you want. After Effects too.
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If you made your menus in photoshop, and the pixel aspect ratio was set to SQUARE, when meanwhile your video footage is NOT SQUARE, Encore will compensate by stretching the video to match the menu (or vice versa actually). Reimport your menu with the correct pixel aspect ratio and you’ll be fine. One word of warning though. Encore was indeed helping you by treating your photoshop menu the way it was. It distorts the menu so that when viewed on a television screen, it will look proper. Now, if you tell Encore the menu is already in NTSC format, it won’t compensate and your menu will look a little stretched. So either you live with it, or redo your menu in photoshop so that it looks the way you want when viewed on a TV screen. There should be more documentation about this, but I haven’t found anything in the help menus.
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Oh yeah, and don’t use Microsoft DV, as it causes compression artifacts – I hate them! Render it out uncompressed before encoding it in whatever program you’re using. I think the artifacts may even make the subsequent compression more difficult on a number of levels.
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That’s a great idea. Though by looking at his menu, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a motion menu, making the navigation very studdery.
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First let me say ‘thank you’ – thank you. Now for my follow-up to your responses:
“Either way is fine since you’re not rendering to fields”
So effectively there is no difference between using the stretch feature or dropping my composition into another composition with a different frame size. Good to know. I’ll use the stretch feature since it is easier.“Your footage, when interpreted correctly would have its fields merged to create a frame in AE”
So AE doesn’t simply throw away fields? It interpolates full frames from both fields automatically as part of the rendering process? The reason I was questioning this was because at one point I accidentally rendered out footage for a DVD WITHOUT fields. All video looked really low resolution. After redoing it, with fields, it looked a lot better. That is why I assumed AE throws away fields completely. It is however possible that while encoding to MPEG2 (in encore), it reinterlaced the deinterlaced footage, resulting in a two-step degrading of video, giving the effect I experienced.“Asking any computer to playback 59.94fps in realtime may be a bit too much to ask for”
Yeah, I agree. I was just asking for education purposes as much as for practice. Ultimately though, I will be posting this video in high-quality form, as I think it deserves to be seen that way. I think it is prudent though to also include a lower-bandwidth version in addition to the high one. I’ll shoot for 320x240x30fps with liberal compression. As you know, finding a balance between quality and file size is an artform in itself.Thanks again. And any more insights in this arena are appreciated.
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Yeah, it is amazing how many people from the print world (I work for a publisher) don’t understand what DPI means. They think it is an actual quality setting in an image rather than a scanning/printing setting. I remember when I was an intern at Disney, my superior told me to increase the DPI of an image in photoshop, to raise the quality.
From a quality standpoint, if you’re not going to transform your images in any way, make their resolution match exactly what the output resolution will be. Absent that, scan them in approximately, with a little extra, then crop them to the resolution you want. If you are going to transform them in anyway in AE, I go with high resolution images, which give you lots of flexibility. If you can manage it, it is always best to scale within AE in twos. It’s better to reduce an image by 50% than 49%, from a quality standpoint.