Compression issues
by Scott Army
on
Jun 23, 2008 at 7:58:49 pm
Hi all,
I was wondering what kinds of settings people had been using for setting up compression in AE? My fundamental problem has been that I created models and geometric backgrounds in 3dsmax. These backgrounds were grey and then lit and rendered. When I composite them into the scene in AE and render them out, I tend to get really bad artifacting in the bg.....looks like a topographic map or the models silhouettes are ghosted all over the background. This is especially the case when I attempt to compress as a Quicktime file.
I've also tried Squeeze and it does the same thing. The models in the foreground can look great, but the background is absolutely horrendous and makes it nearly unwatchable. Does anyone know what I might be able to do to resolve this?
Re: Compression issues by Dave LaRonde on Jun 23, 2008 at 8:06:14 pm
[Scott Army]"I was wondering what kinds of settings people had been using for setting up compression in AE?"
Most people don't. It's usually good practice to render a high-quality file from AE, and let a third-party application do the compression. It's usually better at it.
And if you're going to import an AE-rendered file back into AE, you DEFINITELY want to use a high-quality file. Saving a bit of drive space is false economy because the resulting render won't look as good as it could.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Compression issues by Scott Army on Jun 23, 2008 at 11:06:19 pm
So as a quick question then, I used Squeeze to experiment and chose the CD setting for both Quicktime and WMP. I've tried uping the quality, setting the total size the the project, and adding keyframes at varying intervals. In all cases, the Squeeze output was significantly worse than the Indeo Codec compression I used in AE.
The models themselves looked good if I used high enough settings. But pretty much universally, the background looked like it was captured with 8 bit color.....just horrific.
Re: Compression issues by Dave LaRonde on Jun 23, 2008 at 11:13:20 pm
[Scott Army]"So as a quick question then, I used Squeeze to experiment and chose the CD setting for both Quicktime and WMP. I've tried uping the quality, setting the total size the the project, and adding keyframes at varying intervals. In all cases, the Squeeze output was significantly worse than the Indeo Codec compression I used in AE."
The CD setting? Are you sure you don't mean DVD? Okay, let's assume you do mean CD.
Here's a good rule of thumb to follow: the terms "small file size" and "high quality" are mutually exclusive. If you haven't done a lot of work with video files before, get used to stunningly-huge files.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Compression issues by scott army on Jun 23, 2008 at 11:40:58 pm
Gotcha. I was using the CD setting. But yeah, the reel which is roughly 3 minutes worth of vid is around 10.5 gigs uncompressed. I see people hosting their reels that maintain a fair level of detail and don't get much larger than 69 megs. It's confusing for sure.
