Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects.
by orangeflava
on
Sep 24, 2007 at 8:33:51 pm
Hello. first time poster here.
I am trying to make my first light saber video with adobe after effects and I think I got the hang of how to create the effects via online tutorials but the thing I am stuck on is importing and exporting the video.
I have a 3 and a half minute battle I made with Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 but for some reason when I import it into After Effects it skips a few frames every now and then. I always choose export to MPEG in premiere to get a good quality(albeit big file size) video.
So I have my solids and everything set up in after effects for the lightsaber effect but when I go to the point where I want to animate the saber every other frame skips instead of moving along continuously. Why does this happen? It didn't happen when I tested it out at first with a 10 second clip of my movie. Anyone got any pointers? Am I doing something wrong? Thanks for any help!
Re: Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects. by Aharon Rabinowitz on Sep 25, 2007 at 1:04:50 pm
I think your problem is one of 2 things:
1 - you exported your video compressed, from APE, and as a result, the video keyframes are causing the jerkiness. Work uncompressed.
2 - You are using a different composition frame rate, then your footage frame rate. Select your footage in the project panel and look at the info box up top. Check what the frame rate is. Then go to Composition > Composition Settings, and set the frame rate to the same thing.
Re: Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects. by Dave LaRonde on Sep 25, 2007 at 2:52:38 pm
[orangeflava]"I always choose export to MPEG in premiere to get a good quality(albeit big file size) video."
To expand a bit on what Aharon said:
It's always the best policy to work in uncompressed or lossless in AE. Remember the old mantra of computer geeks from decades past: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Just like Aharon said.
Here's the expansion part: MPEG is an especially bad choice because it uses interframe, or temporal, compression. It looks at a series of frames, finds the stuff that DOESN'T change in the series, and writes that information just once.
Well, that just drives AE nuts, because AE likes frames with complete, not partial, information. That's why the video's skipping.
And if you think an MPEG file is pretty darned big, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Get used to REALLY BIG file sizes in AE.
Re: Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects. by orangeflava on Sep 25, 2007 at 5:38:25 pm
thanks for the replies. I am now trying to export in quicktime but there are so many choices and i don't know which ones are uncompressed. where can i find this out? and when i exported the video was slightly pixelated. what is the best codec/export method to get uncompressed and unpixelated video?
Re: Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects. by taikwanjo on Sep 25, 2007 at 7:39:09 pm
I have Premiere Elements 1.5, and in that version you just go to File-Export-Movie, and make sure the File Type is Microsoft DV AVI, and Color Depth is Millions of Colors. Quicktime/MOV should also work.
A question for you... Could you just use the original captured footage file instead of exporting another copy of it? Depending on which version of AE you have, you should be able to just copy the clip from your timeline in Premiere and paste it into your composition in After Effects. Or you could go to File-Import in AE and import the file from your capture folder.
Re: Adobe After Effects imports my video choppy! Why? Trying to make light saber effects. by Aharon Rabinowitz on Sep 25, 2007 at 11:28:11 pm
DV is a lossy format and should not be used until the final video.
Quicktime with Animation compression, and set to best quality. You can also get smaller sizes with Qucktime PhotoJPEG, but there is some loss. I'd stick with animation compression. Be prepared to use up a bunch of hard drive space. You can always erase the extra files when you're done.
