[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks again Dave and Eric, I appreciate the explanations. I’ve kind of backed into editing work from a different background and all along the way you Creative Cow guys (and Lynda.com) have been my saviors!

-Matt

[Matthew Herzel]

Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I’m not sure if it was a bug that the AE update fixed, or if it was just having trouble with the h.264 footage, but after transcoding to prores the export came out beautifully! I’m not a very experienced editor so this was a good learning opportunity. Transcoding to prores was a standard part of my workflow when I was editing in Final Cut, but since moving to Adobe I was under the impression that Premiere and AE worked played much better with compressed footage. Obviously AE doesn’t, and I’ll be transcoding my source footage from now on!

-Matt

[Matthew Herzel]

AH! Too late! Fingers crossed that I haven’t screwed myself overmuch, as I like neither missed deadlines or problem-solving under pressure. Other than transcoding my source footage to prores and updating AE, anything else you can think of to try Dave, or is this project doomed?

-Matt

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks Brian, I’m updating AE and if that doesn’t do anything for me transcoding the source footage is the next thing I’ll try. Much appreciated.

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks I’m giving that a try!

-Matt

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks for being willing to troubleshoot guys, here are some more specifics:

Running: AE CS6 11.0.2.11 on a MacPro 3.2 ghz quadcore, 8gigs ram, ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB, running OSX 10.8.5

Source footage: 1920×1080 Progressive h.264 Quicktime files out of a Canon 7D at 23.97 fps.

Quicktime Version 10.2 (603.17) installed.

No third party I/O software, just Adobe Creative Suite.

Not using OpenGL or the Ray Traced renderer, only classic 3D.

Render multiple frames simultaneously turned off.

The frame dropping, if that’s what it is, happens both during RAM previews and after rendering out, but not consistently.

I’ve tried a number of codecs during export: h.264 compressed mpeg 4, h.264 compressed Quicktime, ProRes 422 Quicktime, and I’m trying a lossless export with Animation/Quicktime right now.

[Matthew Herzel]

Never really figured out what the problem was, but I found a workaround. I tried exporting the Motion files as ProRes 4444 .mov files and then bringing them back into my Final Cut sequence. No loss of quality, and it rendered and exported out looking great. I thought Motion and Final Cut were supposed to play nice together? It’s great that you can edit Motion projects on the fly and have them automatically update in your Final Cut sequence, but if this loss of quality is unavoidable I’d rather just export a .mov Motion file every time I make a change…

[Matthew Herzel]

I’ve also been struggling with this. When exporting HD footage for the web it’s really noticeable. I’d thought I must be doing something incorrectly, but the more I poke around in these forums the more I think Final Cut (at least 7) just can’t export graphical text elements that are up to my standards. An editor friend of mine who uses Premiere just exported a project using one of the same Motion files as me and it looks fantastic. Is there something I’m missing or is Final Cut just falling short?

-Matt