[Scott Army]

Hey Aharon,

How would I go about attaching my files to a post? Not really familiar with this type of forum structure. I did some more experimentation and noticed that importing my psd as type, “Composition -Cropped Layers”, and then completing the text wipe tutorial led to some wonkiness.

In particular, I wanted to add a fade out section to some text so I added later keyframes to the mask path and basically resized the mask to the right until the text disappeared. While resizing the mask to make the text disappear I noticed that as the mask transform got close to the smaller text near the end of the wipe….that all the small text brightened. To visualize what I’m talking about, I’ll give an example below:

SAMPLE TEXT WIPE (with some tiny text at the end)

So if that was my text, as my mask tranform was dragged closer to the small text in parentheses, the entire grouping “(with some tiny text at the end)” would completely brighten. Any ideas? Hopefully you can help as this has been driving me batty for days.

[Scott Army]

The audio was originally CD that had been converted to an mp3. I then took the mp3 and converted it to a wav file. When I was rendering the file out from AE, I basically used the default settings (Video for Windows Media I think….no compression). The audio I tried both 44100 and 48000 at 16-bit stereo.

When I brought it into Squeeze I used the Windows Media format HD 1080 Hi preset. I used the defaults for the audio and video codecs. I think the only things I changed was to add a lighten filter and set my keyframing to 150. In fact, I didn’t change any of the audio settings at all.

I’ve also tried to compress it with the CD preset, I think the 756 streaming preset, and a couple others. In all cases, when I import my uncompressed file from AE, the symptoms described before will occur. That’s why I thought it might be some setting or hotkey that I pressed by accident or something. I can give you more specifics about exact values once I get home from work. Thanks.

[Scott Army]

Oh and…..since I did find what I thought was an acceptable workaround, I had a separate question. I originally rendered my work out of AE with a music file (as a .wav). It worked fine in AE, however, when I attempted to bring that huge avi file into Squeeze the video wouldn’t appear in the preview window and compressing took multiple hours (eventually it simply failed). If I rendered out of AE minus the music and attempted to compress in Squeeze, everything was peachy and it took about 20 minutes. Any ideas why this might be happening?

[Scott Army]

Hey Aharon,

Been busy with my baby being sick but I’ll try and post some stuff tonight. The original files looks like it was imported as footage. I have since reimported as cropped something or other and was able to get it to work sort of. I never converted it to AE text.

I noted that I wasn’t able to really see my mask’s bounding box when I reimported the files unless I explicitly selected them from the timeline. When I had imported as footage I was able to see the bounding box in the screen. This was weird. Anyway, I’ll try and post up two versions of the file, the one that was broken, and the one that I think I fixed.

[Scott Army]

Thanks Dave, I’ll check it out. : )

[Scott Army]

Gotcha. I was using the CD setting. But yeah, the reel which is roughly 3 minutes worth of vid is around 10.5 gigs uncompressed. I see people hosting their reels that maintain a fair level of detail and don’t get much larger than 69 megs. It’s confusing for sure.

[Scott Army]

So as a quick question then, I used Squeeze to experiment and chose the CD setting for both Quicktime and WMP. I’ve tried uping the quality, setting the total size the the project, and adding keyframes at varying intervals. In all cases, the Squeeze output was significantly worse than the Indeo Codec compression I used in AE.

The models themselves looked good if I used high enough settings. But pretty much universally, the background looked like it was captured with 8 bit color…..just horrific.