Sound clicks and pops
by Mike Fisher
on
Apr 21, 2009 at 11:56:34 pm
Folks-
I am getting clicks and pops in the sound when I render Quicktime movies through After Effects.
All Mac setup, I record the sound in Sound Studio, save as 44kHz, 16bit, stereo aiff. When I import the sound into AE and listen to the preview it sounds fine. But when I render it through After Effects 7.0 small pops and clicks are audible that were not there before. I render the sound as 44kHz 16bit. I don't understand how the pops and clicks are being introduced.
Any ideas what might be causing this? Or ideas about ways to sidestep the problem?
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Dave LaRonde on Apr 22, 2009 at 3:26:12 pm
When I was an AE rookie, I stupidly tried to use an mp3 file. The result: clicks & pops in audio. I mention this because mp3's are compressed, and AE hates compressed audio.
Similarly, AE hates temporally-compressed VIDEO, aka interframe-compressed or long-gop video like HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264. Yeah, you might be able to see a picture with one of those clips, but rendering is a definite crap shoot, resulting in many kinds of weirdness... perhaps even audio weirdness.
So double-check that video footage. It may be the fly in the ointment.
Besides, I've discovered that it's rarely necessary to include audio when rendering in AE, making the issue moot. I've never, EVER had a problem with video from AE matching the audio in my editing application. And from the editor, it's a chip shot to export audio & video for use elsewhere.
If, for example, you're attempting to use AE to make an h.264 file for a web site, don't. AE's compression is pretty bad -- it's intended for down-and-dirty jobs to show clients what an animation will look like. It's not good at all for delivery. It's much better to render a high-quality file in AE, then use a DIFFERENT application for compression: Sorenson Squeeze and Apple Compressor come to mind immediately.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Mike Fisher on Apr 22, 2009 at 4:25:06 pm
Dave,
Thanks for the information. I'll take another look at how I am using the audio in After Effects.
What I am doing is recording audio with microphones to serve as voiceover for an animation. I composite the video (animation) and audio (voiceover) in After Effects and render a quicktime movie that we post online.
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Dave LaRonde on Apr 22, 2009 at 4:39:21 pm
[Mike Fisher]"...I composite the video (animation) and audio (voiceover) in After Effects and render a quicktime movie that we post online...."
You might want to think about a different workflow. AE makes a LOUSY video & audio editor.
My TV station is associated with a newspaper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, and our print brethren across the alley also post video clips on their web site. Their setup may not be as exotic as ours for TV, but they had to learn that it's tough to get by without basic video production software.
Here's a contact name: Richard Pratt, Gazette web video guy and all-around good guy. If you have questions, know that he's in the same boat with you.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Mike Fisher on Apr 22, 2009 at 9:44:30 pm
Dave, thanks.
I spoke with Richard and, although he doesn't use AE, I did find out some good info about how they operate there.
I use audio and video for my small projects but am not any sort of whiz at it. I'm surprised to see you say that AE is a lousy video editor... what do you use for video editing? How does AE fall short in video editing? It does everything I need, but my projects are much smaller than yours it seems.
Thanks.
Mike Fisher
News graphics
San Antonio Express-News
P.S. FYI- This link should take you to one of the animations that I put together.
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Mike Fisher on Apr 22, 2009 at 10:21:44 pm
Folks-
Okay, well, all I did was convert the aiff file to a wav sound file, then render that wav file with the animation in AE and that result has no pops and clicks as with the aiff file. At least that's how it turned out in my very first test.
Use wav files instead of aiff. Live and learn.
Thanks.
Mike Fisher
News graphics
San Antonio Express-News
Re: Sound clicks and pops by Dave LaRonde on May 19, 2009 at 2:27:09 pm
[Hassaan Ashraf]"can you elaborate this more? "
It's simple. AIFC audio, commonly found on Mac computers, is compressed. AE does not work well with compressed audio. If you work with AIFC audio, you need to convert it to AIFF audio BEFORE you import it into AE.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
