After Effects & Vegas 5

orca wrote on 1/3/2005, 6:49 PM
For the experts who are using both. Can I ask for a quick tip of the best output format from After Effects to edit in Vegas? I know the best is uncompressed AVI, but the size is so huge (> 200MB for a 5 second clip) that I don't think it's going to work for me. I've tried DV format but the result is so blocky (quicktime DV it seems). Is the codec on After Effects reliable or do I need to purchase DV codec (e.g. MainConcept) for this? Please advise & thanks in advance.

Comments

B_JM wrote on 1/3/2005, 8:58 PM
compressed targas or huffyuv avi or animation QT MOV

musman wrote on 1/3/2005, 10:28 PM
I haven't tried anything other than uncompressed, but I am satisfied with that. After days of crappy results, I finally learned to export as uncompressed in Vegas and render out of AE the default way (which must be the uncompressed huge files you're talking about). That finally worked and was enough for me. What's nice now is that I've learned of frameserving, so I could have saved the first step. Anyway, I concluded I'd rather spend the money on more storage and move on than try to mess with a winning formula.
orca wrote on 1/4/2005, 12:55 AM
This is weird, either way.. the animation QT mov is good enough for the clip. But once I put that into Vegas and have it rendered using NTSC DV, I see very obvious aliasing. I didn't change anything on the setting just use the default of NTSC DV. And the next one I tried encoding it to mpeg2 using DVDA template VBR 2 pass, and the result is much better. I thought the Sony DV codec was supposed to be good or am I missing some parameters setting here?

farss wrote on 1/4/2005, 3:44 AM
AE doesn't have the field order backwards does it?
B_JM wrote on 1/4/2005, 6:41 AM
i wouldnt have rendered it to DV - unless you felt some really compiling reason to do so .. if working in a lossless format - stay with a lossless format throughout untll final render..

watch the levels if using QT in vegas from AE (always use scopes) AND if rendering NTSC - i render at 30fps file seq. 's (not in AE - but in shake or fusion or whatever) as ntsc 29.97 in AE and in Vegas are not exactly the same speed .. which will cause a problem ..

FuTz wrote on 1/4/2005, 8:06 AM
musman
I don't know a damn about frameserving but : are you using Satish's frameserver to do that?

Your solution is the most appealing to me since hard drives sell for peanuts these days.
orca wrote on 1/4/2005, 9:44 AM
Well.. much of my result will either be rendered to DV (print to tape) or mpeg2 (DVD) so these two formats are the ones I tested. BTW, this is rendered out from Vegas 5, after I tried either QT Mov or uncompressed as the source. I didn't see much difference in the result rendered out of Vegas if I render them to the same format (ie. uncompressed -> Vegas -> DV vs. QT mov -> Vegas -> DV or MPEG2). However I see a lot of difference when I compare the MPEG2 result and DV result. Somehow the MPEG2 is much better. I thought it should be the other way around. At least that's the impression I got from reading a lot of tutorials incl. Spot's re: making a film look.

I guess for something short, I can live with the uncompressed all the way until the final render to DVD. I wasn't concern so much about the HD cost, but whenever I put more HD to my already full tower now, things tend to get a bit slower, especially the startup.

groovedude wrote on 1/5/2005, 12:15 AM
Orca, the default DV out setting in Vegas is set to "Good" quality, try setting it to "Best", then render. It is possible the frames coming out of AE are slightly different size than what Vegas wants, Vegas will stretch it to fill frame, but only with the "Best" setting will Vegas uprez the file like Photoshop. That may not make sense but try it. If you seem to get better results with MPEG, I wonder if its really the visual motion blurring algorithm that makes the frames seem smoother.
rmack350 wrote on 1/5/2005, 7:21 AM
Any DV codec will play havoc with text and other sharp edged graphic elements. It's probably best to keep those away from DV if you can.

If you have to take those sorts of elements down to a 4:1:1 DV codec it would pay off to do a lot of experimentation first.

In addition to the codecs mentioned, I find that photo jpeg looks very good and compresses well. I think it's a good choice to export from AEFX.

Rob Mack
orca wrote on 1/5/2005, 5:15 PM
Hi Groovedude,

I did set it the video quality to BEST since someone mentioned that it's for still photo or graphic elements. I also played around with the aspect ratio, but the aspect ratio is only to get the right proportion of the picture, not the aliasing in the video itself. Maybe it's because of the reason that rmack350 explained. The source of the rendered file is a sharp graphic element (a filmreel spinning around). I'm still tinkering with it, but I just can't quite figure out why the DV codec not even close with the uncompressed and mpeg2. One thing that I wonder is if using different codec (such as MainConcept DV codec) would improve the quality..



rmack350 wrote on 1/5/2005, 9:06 PM
It's because of the way that DV25 does color sampling. It only samples red and blue every 4th pixel so you get some pretty steep staircasing on diagonal lines AND even on verticals the edge of a crisp object ends up falling somewhere within a few pixels of the original edge. It has nothing to do with Vegas, it's the DV format.

Vegas is great about preserving the quality of footage that originated in DV. For Text and graphics, you should NOT render them as DV before going to MPEG. DV is just not as good as whatever you started with.

Oh, and there can be an issue with 29.97 frame rates out of AEFX because AEFX uses a strict 29.97 where as Vegas uses 29.97002997. Eventually Vegas has to skip a frame to make things work so if sync is important then you need to be careful. Vegas does everything at a samples level so the math always gets carried out to a lot of decimal places.

Oh, and I'm talking NTSC, not PAL. Everything's better in PAL, I hear.

Rob Mack
Coursedesign wrote on 1/5/2005, 9:53 PM
"AEFX uses a strict 29.97 where as Vegas uses 29.97002997"

And AE is wrong and Vegas is right.

The exact number for NTSC is defined as 30x1000/1001.

This has historical reasons of course.
orca wrote on 1/5/2005, 10:42 PM
rmack350. I searched other posting and ran across yours re: AEFX. That's why I couldn't find anything on this forum re: this. I didn't know that AEFX is the keyword to search. Anyways, back to your posting here http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=283891&Page=0. Is this going to solve the sync problem between AEFX & Vegas? Using a custom rate of 29.97002997 in AEFX? Thanks for your explanation earlier. It totally makes sense now.

Regards!

musman wrote on 1/6/2005, 12:19 AM
I'm sorry, Futz. I didn't see the post until now. But yes, I use satish's frameserver now. If you don't already have it, here's the address:
http://www.debugmode.com/

It's been a while since I used it much, but I seem to recall that the quality with the larger RGB bit option produced the same results as uncompressed rendering in Vegas and saved that step.
For my first project that ever I used Cinelook inside of AE. The 11 minute short took 1.25 hours to render uncompressed and another 1.25 to render out of AE, then around another 1.25 to encode to mpeg2. Then I'd wait for hte thing to burn to a dvd-rw. I learned that rendering anything out of Vegas for AE needs to be rendered uncompressed or all kinds of bad things happen.
Frameserver would have saved me at least 1 step. If AE could frameserve out, that would save another step. Of course, now I have Boris Red and Cinelook works in it (kind of), so if I needed to render the project today I could just use Boris Red as a filter and get at Cinelook that way, then render to mpeg2 that way. I suspect that the total rendering time might not be that much better then the 3 step way I used before, but at least I could let it render overnight.