[Walter Soyka]

[Matthew Wilson] “Hey Guys, Link to video below. I have some sort of flicker or banding?”

It’s really tough to tell with the YouTube compression, but it almost looks like hum in the video from power. How was this shot recorded?

While there are some tools for fixing flicker, like AE’s Color Stabilizer or GenArts Sapphire FlickerRemove, they are better suited for full-frame flicker, not rolling interference.

You could reshoot, or you can try to fix it with a levels or color correction adjustment layer and animated, feathered mask.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[neil hetherington] “The preview image that I am getting on the monitor does’nt look great, the colours are fine but any graphics or video looks blocky (horizontal blocks) and small thin text is barely readable.”

Is your viewer resolution set to Full?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[jeanne hilary] “I’m exporting the ae project to quicktime using the animation codec for viewing set to best quality and full frame rate. It’s in the output that I see the problem. When I preview in ae, I everything seems to line up properly.”

How are you viewing the rendered output?

The animation codec is not designed for playback; it’s intended instead as a lossless intermediate format between applications. Very few computers have disk subsystems fast enough to keep up with the extremely high data rate of an animation-encoded movie.

If you’re just watching in Quicktime Player, it could be that your computer can’t keep up with the high data rate required for realtime playback, so it may appear to lose sync or drop frames.

Instead, try bringing your render onto your FCP timeline and rendering, or try compressing the animation-encoded movie to something intended for playback, like h264.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

If you double-click on the footage in the Project panel, you can step through it frame by frame with PgDn and PgUp in the Footage Viewer. If you see duplicated frames here (regardless of what frame rate AE is interpreting), then there are duplicate frames in the render. This might also explain why you were seeing extra duplicated frames when the media was interpreted at 24 fps in a 30 fps sequence.

If you do not see duplicate frames here, then there is still a mismatch somewhere. AE should only be duplicating every fourth frame when your media is 24 fps and your comp is 30 fps.

As a test, if you re-import the footage, interpret it at 24fps, then drop it in a new 24fps sequence, do you still see the duplication?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Dale Hildebrand] “In fact I tried 30 fps, 24 fps, 23.98 and 23.976… Same problem every time – frame doubles every fifth frame.”

Are you sure the duplicated frames don’t exist in the footage? If all the comp frame rates in AE match the source footage consistently, AE shouldn’t be introducing any frame duplication.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Use Interpret footage to change the assumed frame rate of the footage.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Wow. I’m trying to help you. This forum is full of motion graphics and effects professionals with a tremendous amount of collective expertise. I don’t think a response like that will encourage many of the posters here to drop their work and help you out.

That said, I did read your post, but it wasn’t very clear:

[sean henvey] “i render an uncompressed avi (i have tried quicktime animation, i have tried unifying the footage as a png sequence – though i may try this again as my first attempts didnt go very well at the encoding to yt stage, it didn’t suit the encoder i was using at the time and i want to limit the amount of times i encode re-encode).”

And several paragraphs down:

[sean henvey] “The intro is black btw with orange 3d text. the main footage is very colorful and is the gameplay. The original avi looks crystal as you would expect. “

I couldn’t figure out whether “the original avi looks crystal” refers to your original footage, or your rendered comp from AE.

In order to help you, we need to clearly understand what point in the process you’re first noticing the artifacting, and what the artifacting actually looks like.

So I stand by my previous post. If your output from AE looks great, then this is a compression questioned better suited for another forum. If not, I asked you some very specific questions about your AE workflow which you have not addressed that could be causing problems.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

All those words, and I’m afraid I still don’t actually understand your problem…

If the renders are coming out clean from After Effects, this question probably belongs in the Compression techniques forum.

If the renders are not coming out clean from After Effects, can you describe a bit more about what artifacts you’re seeing (a video or screen shot might help), what format and codec your source footage is, and how you are handling the three different frame rates you have in your project.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Use a reasonably fast shutter speed. Motion blur makes pulling a clean key more difficult, and you can always add some synthetic motion blur in post if necessary.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Adam Duguay] “We’re a small motion shop looking to expand our storage / file sharing solution. I would also like to use this solution as a render farm for A.E”

Can you describe your current setup in more detail?

AE’s networked watch folder renderer is extremely disk-intensive. If you are rendering, your other file sharing performance will suffer.

[Adam Duguay] “One Idea I had was to purchase a MacPro and run an instance of the A.E Renderer on it.”

If you have a lot of RAM (3-4 GB per core), this could work, but one machine isn’t even a render garden, let alone a render farm. There will be a lot of overhead associated with performing a network render, so if your total render power isn’t substantially more than any one workstation’s, I don’t know if you’ll see a return on your investment.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events