[Shane Robinson]

seems as though turning off the “After Effects Multiprocessing” dramatically improved it for me. Scroll rate is now as fast as the wheel will go rather than the chunky slow lag that it had before.

Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing
uncheck “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously”

[Shane Robinson]

So my solution seems to be to render a AfterEffect h.264 mp4 with the above settings, for general proofing, QA etc. If the flicker is present, which is present throughout the animation if occurring, it does not matter if it is rendered to an animation quality mov and recompressed in Media Encoder, that issue still occurs.

The only technique that seems to work is to adjust the “Set Keyframe Distance” on the output module setting prior to rendering. The default when checked is a value of 33 frames and generally it is fine. But if the flicker occurs I can seem to correct it by adjusting the distance to something around 30 frames and it renders out perfectly fine aside from whatever file size increase occurs.

My question to you Dave, and anyone else with the answer, is how does the keyframe distance effect this rendering? It is some sort of interpolation in converting to h.264 based on number of total frames, or render complexity?

I could understand shorter keyframe distances resulting in higher quality renders with larger filesizes but does the default create some sort of conflict with FPS and total frames rendered? And is there a common rule of say keeping the keyframe distances within so many frames of your FPS or the like?

Thanks.

[Shane Robinson]

Thank you for all your responses.

Unfortunately I was not given a choice on the specs of this animation. It is for software and the programmer seemed very adamant about the 30fps and that resolution. Not my cup of tea but I took his word at what he needed.

I seem to have corrected it by setting the codec profile from main to high, I watched the recent video in the featured content explaining the intricacies of H.264 for some reason changing this setting seems to have put everything back in order. I think I will re-watch that lecture to see exactly what the different specifications affect.

To answer your questions about rendering out to a higher format with the animation setting (I did this after researching the topic and finding that to be in many posts you have here which seem to solve the OP’s problem, so thank you for your online presence Dave!):
I did that initially after this error, it worked perfectly fine… however, it was still giving the same error when rendering H.264 from Adobe Media Encoder using the Animation mov file as a source.

I am still unsure about what is causing it since it seems to be an issue across multiple programs when it occurs. It would appear to be something in the encoding software if it occurs in both AE and the Media Encoder.

Thanks for your responses.

[Shane Robinson]

OK, so it temporarily corrected itself after several restarts (about 4 or 5) but has occurred again today.

Moves?
-Mostly just adjustments in opacity and very basic mask reveals. These are simple animation with no video. The entire image is not jerky, just the items that are moving or changing opacity. If it is an opacity transition fading one background out to another then the entire background image which is a 4 frame step from 0-100% opacity appears to flicker on each step in that range, so it looks like it is blinking rather than fading. This happens for type that fades in as well and any other graphics. The masking animations are jerky as well looking like the edge of the mask is wavering forward and backward on the wipe as it advances.

Software:
OSX 10.6.4
After Effects CS5(updated to current release) to build and render. Quicktime to view mp4 animation. Monitor is just an apple cinema display, final output is for computer screen viewing, not broadcast monitor.

Breakfast:
What breakfast? It used to be a monster energy drink and a smoke in Uni but that was a long time ago and now it’s any kind of caffine around (but thanks for caring 😉 ).

*Render Settings (from AE render que): Best
Quality-Best
Resolution-Full
Size-1024×768
Proxy-No
Effects-Current Settings
Disk Cache-Read Only
Color Depth-Current Settings
Frame Blending-For checked layers (no layers have frame blending enabled)
Field Render-Off
Pulldown-Off
Motion Blur-On for checked layers (being used on some layers)
Use OpenGL: Off
Duration-0:00:35:28
Frame Rate-30.00(comp)

*Output Module: H.264 standard preset
Format-H.264
Output Info-MainConcept H.264 Video
Bitrate: 3.00 Mbps
Output Audio: 48.000kHz/Stereo

No Source footage, being built from PSD files with square AR

Feedback appreciated.

[Shane Robinson]

does it help to know that it’s being rendered as H.264 to an mp4 container? rather than a mov w/ h.264 encoding.

[Shane Robinson]

How do you have the layers stacked? Is the text above or below the cube movie? You may want to try making a duplicate of the cube layer, generating an alpha of it (greyscale) and then applying that to the text via blending mode (duplicate should be above text in stack). Make sure the duplicate does not influence the original by precomping. A screen mode would probably give the look you want.

[Shane Robinson]

Great, thanks, that was exactly what I was wondering. Much appreciated.