Exporting poor quality
by Andy Owen
on
Nov 6, 2008 at 2:04:04 pm
Hey all,
I'm currently running on After Effects 6.5 (I know, I know...*sigh*), and am doing a quick motion graphics intro for a demo reel. I've imported my multi-layered Photoshop graphic (company logo) into AE as a Comp and am adding my motion and effects. One of the pieces of the logo is a diagonal bar and it looks quite pixelated already in the comp window, and when I export it as a QT it just makes it worse.
I've checked (I believe) most of the simple fixes before posting here, I'm looking at it in Full Quality, I'm exporting 720x480 DV/NTSC using H.264 progressive (I also tried as interlaced) at Best quality using the slower encode. It just looks like absolute crap. It's a high-quality Photoshop document that looks sharp anywhere else. Any ideas??
Re: Exporting poor quality by Dave LaRonde on Nov 6, 2008 at 5:31:37 pm
[Andy Owen]".....I've imported my multi-layered Photoshop graphic (company logo) into AE as a Comp and am adding my motion and effects. One of the pieces of the logo is a diagonal bar and it looks quite pixelated already in the comp window....."
How big is this logo when you import it as a comp? What are you doing with the diagonal layer? Do you have the logo in the form of an Illustrator document, which will maintain the edge sharpness of its layers?
[Andy Owen]"...I'm exporting 720x480 DV/NTSC using H.264 progressive..."
Don't export, render using the Render Queue. It's almost always better to do that.
Usually, the files you render out of AE are intended to be used in another application. You like to maintain the best image quality, so you don't lose anything... and for that, H.264 isn't a good choice.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Exporting poor quality by Andy Owen on Nov 6, 2008 at 6:12:43 pm
Thanks so much for those tips Dave! My last employer used the Production Suite all together so that I just created a comp and when I was ready I imported it into Premiere's timeline which gave me a polished line to work around. Well, now I'm on a mish-mash of software from AE 6.5 to FCP 5. It works...but this is the one graphic that's giving me trouble and I can't pick out what's different.
It'd been so long since I couldn't just drag a comp into PPro, that I'd forgotten all about the render queue! Duh! Thanks for that reminder.
As for the diagonal bar, it's simply a 2D object in 3D space (using it with my camera layer). So the camera rotates from left to right while it drops vertically from off screen into the center of the screen. Pretty simple...I can't figure out why it looks like trash. I'll try re-creating it with the tools in AI and see if that helps too.
Rather than H.264, if I'm doing this to import it into FCP when I'm done, what would you recommend? Just a QT movie file?
Re: Exporting poor quality by Dave LaRonde on Nov 6, 2008 at 6:47:18 pm
[Andy Owen]"...Rather than H.264, if I'm doing this to import it into FCP when I'm done, what would you recommend?..."
It all depends on what you're going to do with it -- the medium you will use after your're done in FCP -- and you haven't said yet.
There is one definite, however: if this is to be an alpha-channeled animation, you need to render using Quicktimes's Animation codec, best quality, rgb+alpha, millions of colors+, and Straight (NOT Premuliplied), because FCP likes its alpha channels straight.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
