[Walter Soyka]

You might try pre-rendering with Quicktime Animation (at 100% quality) or Quicktime PNG; both are lossless.

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
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[Walter Soyka]

Dave’s Stock Answer #1 is about video formats that AE imports, but doesn’t always handle correctly. If you are using HDV, MP4, or similarly compressed footage, you can get all kinds of unexpected results. The solution is transcode the footage to another format that doesn’t use temporal compression, like Uncompressed AVI or Quicktime PNG.

Very few effects make use of the GPU for assisted rendering (for example, Knoll Light Works). If you don’t see any options in your effects that refer to GPU rendering, you don’t need to worry about it as a possible source of your problem.

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]

It’s just like a VTR, so you would need one per source, but it records ProRes files to hard drive (or SSD, or ExpressCard Flash) instead of video to tape. I think the MSRP is $3,995 with a 250 GB drive module.

Here’s the website — AJA Ki Pro Recorder.

The COW has an AJA Ki Pro forum, too.

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]

We’ve recorded directly to ProRes with the AJA Ki Pro for direct-to-edit with FCP — works wonderfully.

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]

[Uli Plank] “If you footage is very clean (computer generated?), adding a little bit of noise can help.”

This is a great point — adding noise to the gradient should help smooth it out some.

It will also force the encoder to spend more bits on it, at the expense of other areas in the image. Like everything in compression, it’s a tradeoff, and finding the right balance takes usually some time and effort. You could also do a noise reduction pass on the entire clip, which would free the encoder from spending bits on noise in the subject and let it allocate a few more to the gradient background.

We’re still missing some information that could help. I understand that the final display will be a PC monitor, but we don’t know anything about the delivery. Web, where file size may be a constraint? Or local playback, where the file size (and bit rate) could be much higher?

I also haven’t seen Filippo confirm whether he’s using multi-pass encoding, which should help quite a bit. Adding forced keyframes might help a bit, too, at the expense of file size. Again, I’m sure he could find some good help on this in the Compression techniques forum.

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]

What’s the intended use of these files? Will the final display be 10-bit capable?

Banding is a pretty common problem with single-pass or low bit rate encodes. Are you using multi-pass encoding? Can you push your target bit rate or quality setting higher?

Also, the final output is a function of the encoder. I use Apple Compressor, Sorenson Squeeze, Telestream Episode, and Matrox CompressHD, and their h264 encoders all produce different looking outputs, even with comparable encode settings.

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]

What kind of footage (and what codecs) do you have in the comp? If it’s a codec that uses interframe compression like h264 or HDV, you might see weird glitches. Search this forum for Dave’s Stock Answer #1 for more.

What effects are you using here? Some effects have an option to use the GPU for render that’s separate from AE’s preferences.

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]

What exactly is the naming convention for your files? Are you sure there’s no subtle difference between the file names, like Image(space)(space)001.psd and Image(space)002.psd? You might also try checking the force alphabetical order button on the image sequence import.

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]

Are the files for the image sequence numbered sequentially at the end of the filename, and are they all in the same folder?

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]

[Dave LaRonde] “Okay, I’m a Mac guy: keep that in mind
Quicktime movies in either PNG or Animation codecs: both lossless
To do it: Apple Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder, QT Pro”

Dave, this could make a great addition to your Stock Answer.

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