After Effects and Vegas 6?

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farss wrote on 11/1/2005, 7:11 AM
When you say 'off', do you mean the actual colors have shifted?
Motion artifacts will depend on the bitrate that you're encoding at and the amount of motion. The compression system is affected by the amount of difference between the I frames and the subsequent frames in the GOP.
I'd suggest first off creating say a 1 second animation in AE with no motion at all. Bring that into Vegas, it should match what you see in AE perfectly but watch for colors that are out of gamut, restrict the colors to no more than 80% in any direction, sorry I don't know the precise numbers but that should keep you out of trouble.
Encode that to mpeg-2 and bring the resulting file into another track in Vegas, again it should look pretty much the same, you'll get some differences as you're now going from 4:4:4 to 4:2:0 but you certainly should see no macroblocking as you have no motion.
If you're still getting macroblocking then something very wierd is going on!
Just a thing to consider, an image sequence that's just a whole frame of color where the color changes between frames is an awefull lot of motion! No values within each encoding block will match from frame to frame, that's why dissolves give the mpeg-2 encoder a hard time. Fortunately the differences maybe only small so the encoder will cope but I just highlight this point as it's easy to think of 'motion' as being say a car speeding past where in fact if it's a locked off shot of a race car there's actually very little total motion whereas a locked off shot of a static scene with bad heat haze is a lot of motion. That's also why video noise is a big problem.
Bob.
FrankLP* wrote on 11/1/2005, 8:12 AM
Just one other thought...would I have the same problems if I were using Adobe Premiere Pro? Not that I want to shell out $$ for a different NLE, but if the problem is the workflow between Vegas and AE, I mau not have a choice. I just need to get to the botom of this so that I can use AE without the loss of quality. Thoughts on this option?
Coursedesign wrote on 11/1/2005, 9:35 AM
There is nothing wrong with AE<->Vegas, you just have to use the right workflow.

Please tell us, step-by-step, with any settings, how you are transferring the clips back and forth, and what exactly you do in AE.

People use this combo every day, and it works.
FrankLP* wrote on 11/1/2005, 9:56 AM
That's refreshing to hear Coursedesign...hopefully this is just a simple "duh" on my part. Here's an example of what I did recently:

Captured footage from Sony PD170 using V6 (in this example a 10 second clip of a guy delivering a motivational message to his staff).

Imported that clip (AVI file) into AE for fx treatment (i.e. Trapcode Particular for a smoke fx; and animated AE masking)

Composite settings in AE are DV NTSC template (720x480)

Render out of AE as uncompressed AVI (and have tried using both the thousands & millions of colors settings)

Load AVI back into V6 to assemble with other clips for final composition.

Once composition is complete, render entire thing as MPEG 2 (I've tried MPEG 1 also).

Use DVD architect to author final MPEG into DVD.

But even before the DVD is created, I notice the difference from the file when it was in AE to when it is V6. so it seems like I'm screwing something up between the two applications. Hopefully this helps. Let me know if you need additional information. Thanks.

farss wrote on 11/1/2005, 1:26 PM
I could be way off the mark here but if your composite settings in AE are DV NTSC then the thing is being done at that res, you then render out to uncompressed but all you've done is go from lo res NTSC DV to hi res uncompressed.

Start with something pristine in AE, like Vegas generated media as I have no idea what condition the footage from the 170 is in.

Whatever your problems are I seriously doubt using PP or FCP etc is going to make them go away. Vegas reads the uncompressed AVI the same way any other application would, if it don't look right in Vegas it'll not look right elsewhere.

Just one more thought, you might do slightly better rendering out of AE to uncompressed with alpha and then compositing in Vegas, this would avoid having the original DV material going through a number of additional steps.
Bob.
Coursedesign wrote on 11/1/2005, 1:48 PM
It's a bad idea to anything in AE in the NTSC DV codec, imho.

Better to render from Vegas to a 4:2:2 uncompressed codec first, and then process that in AE (in that format!) before exporting it to Vegas.

FrankLP* wrote on 11/1/2005, 3:30 PM
Thanks farss and Coursedesign,
I have to admit that I'm not totally gettin' al this, but I'll give your suggestions a go. FYI - The raw footage from the 170 looks fabulous, and the captured footage (AVI) looks just as good.

In regards to a 4:2:2 uncompressed codec, is that in Vegas or do I need to purchase that (I didn't see it amongst the settings available).

Thanks again for your help here.