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After Effects Question

polycounter lvl 14
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NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
Hello , I recently started to try out After effects and I ws making a Sort of Fog tutorial ... this one in prticular ...
Tough To vary it I have delayed the entrance into play of the Adjoustement layer to colorize the fog and Also done so that the fog starts little from the bottom to grow up to the full fo type as in the tut ... It looks all perfect as I mixed in also images and things , titles etc , but just at the beginning when the fog start to grop there is an annoying scaled effect on like if there are layers of gray cloud shapes one over the other that build up the fog , this disappears after or is not so visible ... I have tought it coudl be to resolution , but I have increased it to 1900 x 1069 and is still present , I have so tried to apply a blur but it served only to wash out the fog so , what can it be due this scaled tonality effect in the degrees of gray in the beginning ? Unfortunately I cannot post a preview picture but I hope to have been clear ...


to be even more clear I make an example ...
just immagine a gray smoke coming from a side , the several clouds are very evident and to each you can guess the gray tone level and is like seeing different gray cloud shapes of several degrees moving over each other ...

I can post ttough a still image of the movie .... comparison ...

28178211.jpg


As you can see the left is how looks in After effects , while on right is how looks in VLC player after having it saved with adobe premiere ....

Replies

  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    After Cheking the problem is not in after effects because the output is right as is in the preview , but in Premiere , that saves as slopy results despite I set all to max setting best codecs etc ... any ideas?
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    NAIMA wrote: »
    After Cheking the problem is not in after effects because the output is right as is in the preview , but in Premiere , that saves as slopy results despite I set all to max setting best codecs etc ... any ideas?

    post a screen of your render/output module settings. It looks like your output is being compressed. Its generally considered bad practice to compress your footage when going between apps. Always export lossless (tga is good).
    you'll need an viewer for image sequences (this is my favourite)

    Also it might be a good idea to do your composition in 16 or 32 bit. your getting banding in the fog (probably caused by some grade your doing.) Using a higher bitdepth should fix this.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    Why TGA?
    I made the movie in After effects and saved as an Avi , I just needed to add sound , music and some other mixmatch of videos in premiere but it keeps altering the original output ...

    Those are my settings ...

    http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/8987/20951634.jpg
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    Export your footage as a TGA sequence from AE, or use an uncompressed AVI. Your using DV enconding at the moment and its causing the banding and loss of fidelity.

    Also that image is from media encoder I wanted the Render/Output settings from the AE RenderQ

    The only time you should ever compress your footage when your making your deliverable final render.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    But if I export as tgas I will have a flood of picture frames ? then what are the exact settings to export as uncopressed Avi? I see the main problem is in the saving of the Premiere tough what settings should I use there to save without loss of quality ?
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    premier will treat the tga sequence just like a video file.(make sure your interpreting it at the right fps though)

    once your done in premier then render as a video file with compression.
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    yeah - compress when you publish the final result and not before

    compressing something twice doesn't make it smaller, it just makes it look shit
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    OkI will try that but what's the setting to use for TGA ?
    Tough the weird thing is tht the output from AE looked ok , while the one from Premiere , crap ...

    Btw another small problem I have is I made the movie in 1900x1069 for some weird reasons and I wanted to resize it to a 1920 x1080 can I do it in premiere without having to rescale manually every layer and have reslution losses?
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    NAIMA wrote: »
    OkI will try that but what's the setting to use for TGA ?
    Tough the weird thing is tht the output from AE looked ok , while the one from Premiere , crap ...

    Btw another small problem I have is I made the movie in 1900x1069 for some weird reasons and I wanted to resize it to a 1920 x1080 can I do it in premiere without having to rescale manually every layer and have reslution losses?


    so long as its oversized its not a problem. your better resizing your comp though.
  • JudgeJacket
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    JudgeJacket polycounter lvl 9
    It's always a good idea to render the movie in tga or png image sequences. Yeah you end up with a flood of images you have to put together (which is very easy), but there are many advantages to this method over rendering as avi's or mov's.

    For starters, the avi file will have a lot of its quality lost during the compression. If uncompressed, it will be a very large file size. The most obvious one is that if After Effects crashes or there's an error during rendering you have to start the whole render from the beginning.

    Rendering tga image sequences result in smaller file sizes with very little quality loss. It has 32-bits per channel capability and it's easier to fix mistakes. Also, in a production house that uses render farms across multiple computers, you can only net render image sequences anyway since rendering a movie can only be done by one machine. Get into the habit of doing image sequences soon.
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    I found that .tga is quite big, .png looks as good and is smaller, but it really depends on the needs.

    we have gigabytes of image sequences here at work, so dont worry about that, its natural.

    what i dont understand is why you would want to import that into premiere afterwards? i mean, you can rescale and add sound in after effects pretty well!
    i came to dislike premiere, just because of its awefull exporting. thatsa muhc easier in aftereffects.
    also, to answer your output question: try to use the highest you can!
    you will compress them later, when you export your video.

    additionally to the things Jacker said:
    if you render out an avi and your max crashes somewhere in between you need to restart all over again. with an image sequence you can begin with the last rendered frame.
    you cannot render a movie over a renderfarm
    and if you for instance need to change something in a specific time range (from frame x to y) you can only change those.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    I am sorry I am very very new to premiere and after effects i am just tyring to learn them by promo versions etc , the reason why I put in premiere is because the movie I did in After effects needs the following things :

    a preloading black screen that I enlarged to a 5 seconds lenght
    a howling wnd sound to mix in and regulate the volume as background
    a maintheme song track
    Several Clips to mix in and out of the main movie with fad effects
    overall lenght is 3.30 mins
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    well, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

    my boss would probably do everything in premiere, he loves that thing.

    but everything you list would be possible in after effects.

    you can take an image and drag it into the timeline, then drag the bar longer. if you want it to fade into the footage you can keyframe the opacity.
    same goes for the clips

    you can import audio files (the standard ones) just as any other footage. i think (i'm doing this from the top of my head right now) there is a dB value, which you can keyframe. else there may be an effect for that.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    Sorry my noobness , but i can't find how to export tgas , I only have the option save as AVI in after effects ...
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    Activate the composition you want to export, then go to composition (on the top menu) -> add to render output
    your render queue should show up, click on the file format, a new window should open.
    there in the dropdown change it to .tga

    always remember: with b and n you can define in and out points in your timeline. you need to change them to wherever you want the render process to start and end. alternativly it can be dragged aswell.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    that's the problem I have only Avi as option and not tga ... or should I just save as myvideo.tga?
  • JudgeJacket
  • JudgeJacket
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    JudgeJacket polycounter lvl 9
    Ew.. that turned out pretty blurry. Guess I've yet to get the hang of it, but it should be clear enough.
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    Ok I managed to save as Tgas but how I do to import in premiere the sequence ? I have the image sewquence grayed out ...
  • JudgeJacket
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    JudgeJacket polycounter lvl 9
    In premiere,

    File > Import

    Find the folder that holds the image sequence. Select the first image in the folder. Tick the box that says "Image Sequence". Open it up, and there's your movie clip. Just drag it in your timeline and you're good to go.

    Good luck with your project. Like xXm0RpH3usXx mentioned, After Effects can do all those things you want to do. But for a simple editing job, Premiere's fine. It's also able to work with sound a hell of a lot better than After Effects.

    My workflow's like this:

    Create a film or animation in After Effects. > Render my work with targa's for safety and quality (the fact it supports alpha is helpful too). > Import the completed sequence images back into the program and do a check to see if there's anything needing to be modified or tweaked. (If I do change something, I only need to render the area that I modified without having to render the entire film again) > THEN render as Mov or Avi or whatever once I'm ready to add sound and am satisfied with the final result. By this stage, rendering an image sequence to an Mov takes no time at all.
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    You image sequence should have a num,bering like
    mytga001.tga
    mytga002.tga
    mytga003.tga
    .
    .
    .

    and so forth.
    else it wont be recognized as such, but after effects will probably have named them well.

    the workflow judge described is helpfull because you can preview you .tga sequence a lot more smoothly than your original comp, because it does not need to render the effects again and again. just wanted to make that clear...
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    ok and what are the best settings to save after I did all my editings in Premiere ? Avi? mp4? I 'd like to publish after on youtube maximum res wich I think is 1920 x 1080 ... what are so the best export setting from premiere to have no quality loss?

    thanks a lot everyone for the help ....

    Btw as side question ...

    Is there anywhere that I can see how to make a chroma key? Lke using a green background and cut that to preserve only the front of the movie?
  • abmurray
    Do you have the adobe media encoder?

    It has presets that are very clearly named and self-explanatory.
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    Videocopilot is your friend:
    http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/basic_color_keying/

    I would recommend a quicktime container with a h264 codec for youtube.

    Also, for colorbanding there is a little trick. sometimes it works, depends on your screen really, though.
    Add some fine grain to your footage, it breaks the difference in the color values. comes in with the obvious downside of a grainy picture, though :/
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    NAIMA wrote: »

    Is there anywhere that I can see how to make a chroma key? Lke using a green background and cut that to preserve only the front of the movie?


    color keying tutorial

    www.videocopilot.net has LOADS of brilliant AE tutorials. keying included.
    A fun side effect of the tutorials is you'll spot them comming up in tv adds all the time :D
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    r_fletch_r wrote: »
    A fun side effect of the tutorials is you'll spot them comming up in tv adds all the time :D

    thats when the andrew kramer in your head starts screaming :)
  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
    I am having quite a problem in streaming audio in same time as video in after effects as everystep needs perloading render and it takes an insane amount of time while in premiere is all faster , but ...

    I have noticed the following problem , the video in adobe after effects is in 30 fps the one in prermier imported from ae is 25 well I have a result of offset in timing so I can't really match audio with clip positions to sync , what you sugest me to do ?I am sure I have exported it at 30 fps so I dunno why premiere reads in 25 fps ....

    It took 3 hours to export all the tgas of 3.5 minutes from AE and I can't just reexport something that I am not even sure is ok ...
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    when you create your project in Premier you need to make sure its using the same framerate as your AE project. then when you import the image sequence it will work fine.
  • .morph3us
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    .morph3us polycounter lvl 14
    as you where exporting a bitmap sequence its totally irrelevant in which fps you exported from ae. (as long as your composition is set to 25 fps it doesnt matter if you export to 30 fps with a bitmap sequence)

    important is that you import it in the right fps amount in premiere then.

    using precompositions helps speeding up the preview, as the footage inside is not thrown out of ram if you change something in the composition above it.
    also you might want to change your viewport output to half or quarter, the image wont show as clear anymore, but it buffers faster. this has nothing to do with exporting though
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