[Keith Mcgregor]

That footage is washed out and unsaturated. Pretreat it in a pre comp first, then key that comp. You’ll have much better results. Maybe it’s just the compression on the file you uploaded, bit it looks like an awful lot of chromatic aberration, like looking at an old crt monitor, which is contaminating your key. Too much red on the green screen.
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

I’ve seen the video online and it is really compressed. If he made it, have him export a full res version and then compress it. He needs to research more on compressing and to do tests. Like Dave I really don’t see ‘banding’, but I do see compression artifacts (even though the screen shots are really small and hard to see much), which is normal in today’s web videos. And that black gradation? It’s lighting falloff, I assume it was shot on digital? Gotta light for digital cameras, way different than high end cinema cameras.
You’ll need to post his actual vid though, as it will explain better what’s happening to his vid, verses the MK video.
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

Since I don’t have particular I can’t render it as it is supposed to be, but I opened the ‘Final’ comp and it rendered just fine. What is actually happening at 5:11? I would try exporting the animation comp by itself and bring it back in to the Final comp. replacing the comp with footage should help. Or maybe render all the particle layers separate and re-import. You might want to try rendering to a tiff sequence and see if that helps. Make sure you have the multi-processing and media cache enabled.
That must be a lot of particles to make it take 9 hours for 5 seconds, or is your machine under powered?
Sorry to not be of much help
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

Sure is, export lossless and transcode to mpeg 4 in an encoding package. Done!
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

Without seeing what the elements look like it’s really hard to tell. If you posted a screenshot for us we then can offer more help.
But anyways, if the HD comp in a SD comp looks bad then you might want to consider changing the elements slightly to get rid of the flickering. If you just look at the qt file at half size some elements are bad looking, but not when rendered at the half size, as only 100% really shows you what it looks like.
Are they strict geometric lines at an angle? Try a drop shadow or alpha blur.
Are there really thin lines? Make them a little bigger.
The screen captures are probably captured at h264 compression so they will look fuzzy anyway (see youtube tutorials on maya for example of how bad it gets) but when scaled down I imagine the text if there is any, is illegible?
If they are screen captures and psd files I would hope you wouldn’t interpret them as interlaced.
Did you try bringing the HD comp into SD comp and check the preserve resolution when nested option in the HD comp? Dunno if it will help.
Sorry to not be of more help.
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

RAM previews are based on how much ram is on your system. The disk cache should be for, well they explain it better:
“Disk cache
After Effects can store rendered items to your hard disk when the RAM cache is full during standard previews. Blue bars in the time ruler of the Timeline, Layer and Footage panels mark frames that are cached to disk. Note:
The disk cache is not used for RAM previews. It is only used for standard previews.”
as found here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/memory-storage.html

and read it ALL, but what you’re looking for is 3/4 the way down the page. Hope this helps!
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

I suppose you could add the stroke effect? Effects/Generate/Stroke and it attaches itself to masks, which you choose from the dropdown. You should be able to have multiple stroke effects on the one layer if you wanted some to be different colors than others.
But I am unsure how much you want to manipulate said stroke. This way you can have the stroke as an effect, yet still have the fill layer.
Also, did you try selecting the paths in PS and copy from there to paste in AE? I have done it with Illustrator many times and it keeps the paths, the millions there might be, and I can still tweak the masks.
Or if all else fails, use 2 layers, one for the stroke and one for the fill?

-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

Did you post this on adobe forums? Try that as well, maybe some engineer can help. Maybe it has something to do with your custom QT settings? I don’t know what your firewall has to do with it unless you are rendering across multiple machines.
You shouldn’t be able to even see any codec your machine doesn’t have installed, so that shouldn’t be it. Post the QT settings, and in the meantime you can render out image sequences and compress them in another program to a different codec, or try the avi since you are on windows. And you have opened other qt movies and they work fine? Quicktime isn’t a codec, it’s a wrapper. The form of compression could be anything, it just has the .mov extension.
Never seen that error before…
sorry to not be of much help
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

If you have media encoder just use the flash for web or h264 for web presets after you render out lossless in AE, check which looks better to your eye.
Out of AE I set the project bit depth to 16, and I render out pro res 422 LT mostly, otherwise it’s lossless.
For crunching to web I usually just use a 8mps bit rate. Good enough for web at 1280.
For more info I set to 10-15. To crunch it, 2. It really all depends on the speed that images are moving at and the amount of blurs, color precision and gradations. That’s really when you need it higher, otherwise 6mbps is usually good enough for most viewings.
If you really want it higher, then you have to live with the larger file sizes.

Compressing is really trial and error, there is no magic setting for everything and some people (most web-trawlers) won’t even notice the kinds of things we do.
After you have encoded the master from AE you can delete the source file as you still have the ae project and all it’s assets, saving on space.

Remember to always check the site you are uploading to so you can know your file size limit, and you can make bit rate adjustments off of that, increasing or decreasing as allowable.

Hope this helps
-Keith

[Keith Mcgregor]

Hi Chris-
Yeah, I just wanted to see if it could give a good starting point, get some separation and figure out what to roto after that. Your solution sounds pretty good and is definitely worth the effort just to try, let’s just hope it’s not too windy throughout the shot.
-Beers!
-K