[Stanley Flomin]

Ahh well, I think what it came down to was that there were time remapped keyframes that caused it to go dark for some reason. Try either deleting the keyframes or re-place it(literally, if you have clip “A” on the timeline, just delete it and just put the same clip back).
The bin are the files (usually) on the left side of the screen, essentially you’re project folder with all the clips that you imported into your sequence.

Hope that made sense.

[Stanley Flomin]

hah I can’t say I know anything about her, that was her first time here 🙂
I don’t usually have much to do with the actors, just edit the videos.

I totally hear you on the animation one being contrasty, it was actually like that to make up for what rendering it out as dv ntsc, then it’d look normal. The final output is only watched on another computer monitor so I don’t need to worry about what it will look like on a tv. But at least now I understand why dv looked ‘washed out’.

I will definitely give sorenson a shot, I know others have spoken highly of it as well.

Many thanks for all your help Mark, and of course everyone else.

[Stanley Flomin]

ah I didn’t know that about the animation and ‘none’, thanks.
I tried rendering out as the codec that it was filmed at (dv ntsc) and rendered out 2 qt files from the same clip. One was set to the original codec dv ntsc, and the other as animation. Even though the dv ntsc clip uses the same exact codec that it was filmed and the quality seemed like it was the same to me, the only difference was that it looked like the dv ntsc codec washed the colors out a slight bit, making things brighter.

Do you think thats just an adobe media encoder issue? How could the animation codec rendered it out to look exactly like it did in my premiere sequence, I was hoping the dv ntsc codec would do so as well 🙁

anim codec :

dv ntsc(footage was in dv ntsc)

[Stanley Flomin]

wow thanks for the really detailed answer. That was very informative! I will certainly look into the hardware you mentioned. I work in a small and new production studio and although I’m fairly new here I can tell that they are doing some really strange things that should be fixed. But I didn’t want to present anything to them until I understood the issue inside out.

I DID feel like we were doing double compression but I wasn’t 100% sure on that because when they output from premiere they do it in fully uncompressed qt files (using either the ‘none’ or ‘animation’ codec, leaving the quality at the highest setting). They later compress their files to H264 as final output to their clients. Is that considered double compression….I wasn’t sure since the first ‘compression’ didn’t really seem like compressing anything.

Thanks again Mark, and everyone else!

[Stanley Flomin]

err sorry if i wasn’t clear. I was giving an example of when I made an HD720p composition in after effects without any footage, just took a shape layer, threw some effects on it and rendered it. The purpose of that was to downconvert it into dv ntsc and see its quality in full screen mode. Which sadly was blurry. I did this because someone mentioned earlier that when studios downconvert it looks good at full screen because it was originally in much higher quality…so i did the same thing minus the footage but still using HD effects.

[Stanley Flomin]

Hmm….I’m actually downconverting in compressor since for whatever reason after effects/premiere can’t export as mpeg2(or maybe its just labeled as something else and I’m not aware of it?)… But when I output from premiere it ports it to adobes media encoder, is that the same thing as rendering from premiere?

Thanks again, oh and I work with just plain dv ntsc footage.

[Stanley Flomin]

thanks for the responses so far guys

I get you guys on the dv footage, I’m not saying its not upscaling, just saying the upscale isn’t as good on my qt files even when the original sizes look great. But I still have one more issue. Say I make some effect in after effects purely with whatever after effects provides me(no footage/images). Just effects, shape layers , whatever. I’ve rendered it at HD 720. When I compress the HD one down to 720×480(highest mpeg2 settings i can get) and view it fullscreen ….it clearly looks like…well I don’t want to say crap because its not, but you can still clearly see the difference in sharpness.

[Stanley Flomin]

I understand that, but is there a way for me to integrate whatever this upscaling feature is into my qt files so that at fullscreen they look as well as when the dvd player upscales it?

[Stanley Flomin]

hmm…try checking to make sure your layer visibility is on in premiere(and check the opacity too)…if that doesnt work try throwing your after effect files into a new PR sequence and see if they render out fine. If they do then you know its something with the original sequence and maybe you can just copy the rest into a new sequence…if it doesn’t double check your AE file, maybe you have a layers visibility turned off or something on top of them….good luck!

[Stanley Flomin]

I know about the square pixel thing, my only issue is that the video is not interlaced, but most transitions and some effects ARE interlaced. There is no way to de-interlace only transitions and effects as far as I’m aware. Also, I tried setting my fields to progressive but this didn’t fix anything other then making my video blurry….and the effects still remained interlaced…although checking ‘single field’ in the qt settings fixed the transitions it again, made my video blurry.