Hope someone can help with this....my latest problem.
I apologize in advance for the ridiculous length of this post.
I’m fairly new to AE (only been using it for about a month, maybe a little longer) after having used Premiere forever and a day.
I have a project which was edited together in Premiere 6.5 and then imported into After Effects. (No filters/effects were applied in Premiere, other than transitions, which weren’t preserved by AE anyway so they were rebuilt in AE).
The footage is a live video of a stage show which was performed by a local theater group. It was a two camera shoot so I am cutting between two different sources.
The first camera (I’ll call it camera A) was a Panasonic which does in-camera 16:9 (not “cropped”). The second camera (Camera B) was a Sony which was fitted with a Century Optics 16:9 lens thus squeezing a 16:9 image into its regular 4:3 frame for later “unsqueezing”.
The footage was imported into Premiere and edited, all two hours and forty minutes of it. (Long show). The Panasonic (camera A) footage, when imported into Premiere, was automatically “tagged” by Premiere as being 16:9 footage w/a pixel aspect ratio of 1.200. The Sony stuff (camera B) shows as 0.9 aspect ratio; however w/the project settings in Premiere set to NTSC Widescreen 16:9 everything previewed fine, ratio-wise.
The project was imported into AE, where the Camera A footage was set to be interpreted as D1/DV NTSC Widescreen (1.2) with “Separate Fields” set to “Lower Field First”.
These same interpret settings were used for the Camera B footage, so that the 4:3 image would be interpreted as a compressed 16:9 image to match the first camera’s footage (Camera B was filmed w/a 16:9 lens, after all). Not a problem, it looked fine during editing in AE, even during RAM preview the aspect ratios matched & were correct.
The composition settings in AE were:
Preset: NTSC DV Widescreen, 720 x 480
Pixel Aspect Ratio: D1/DV NTSC Widescreen
Framerate: 29.97
Resolution: Full
Now here’s where it gets interesting.
The 16:9 footage from the Panasonic is not perfect 16:9; although the frame dimensions are correct, the Panasonic’s so-called “in-camera” widescreen actually distorts the image – everything looks slightly stretched horizontally in 16:9. This can be corrected by “re-squishing” the image a bit in AE – using Transform to shrink the width of the image down to 93% of it’s width corrects the overstretch. However this leaves empty space at the left and right of the 16:9 work area/frame. Not a problem – I created black matte bars to fill in the space on either side and put this in an adjustment layer at the top of the project so that those same bars would appear over the footage from the Sony (even though I didn’t need to squeeze the camera B footage – the 16:9 lens worked like a charm…the black bars just cover the outer parts of camera B’s picture), and everything would match. (A royal pain in the arse, but it worked, and those outer edges will most likely be lost to overscan on a television anyway).
The rest of the project was taken up with color correction, some clone tool painting (some of the camera B scenes needed to be rotated (again, with Transform) to adjust for slightly off-kilter camera angles, and this left blank areas at the edges which needed to be filled in) and the usual gamma/contrast adjustments. The project was originally being done at 8bpc color, but before it was rendered I changed that setting to 16 bpc. Once the whole beast was done I rendered it to DV using the built in codec, with everything set to the highest possible settings:
Quality=Best,
Resolution=Full (I set this to render every 1 pixel, I would assume this is also what “Full” means)
Size: 720 x 480
Frame Blending: off
Field Render: Lower Field first
Motion Blur: Off for all layers
The Output Module says it is based on “lossless”. The settings listed are:
Format: Video for Windows movie
Output info: Microsoft DV
Spatial Quality= 100
Key frame every 1 frames
Embedding: off
Channels: RGB
Depth: Millions of colors
Color: Premultiplied
Final size: 720 x 480
In the Timeline, Layer Quality for all layers is set to Best.
The first hour and 12 minutes of the video took 50 hours to render. And once it was done I looked at it and here’s the problem.
It looks terrible.
The whole thing is blurry. Or “soft”, I should probably say. The cameras used were not HD, but the raw footage is still much sharper than the final output from AE. MUCH sharper. Everything now looks dull. Why? This is only one extra generation (no rendering was done with Premiere). I find it hard to believe that the DV codec included with AE 6.0 is this bad (??!??) especially after the amount of money I’ve spent on this software.
The most telling verdict was when a female friend of mine looked at the rendered footage and said “The original looked a lot shinier and new.”
So I am stuck. I’m not going to go ahead and render the other hour-and-whatever of the video until I can determine why the footage looks so dull and soft/blurred. I’ve laid out all the details above, so I am really hoping and praying that someone can point me in the right direction and I can fix this.
Thanks in advance…
I apologize in advance for the ridiculous length of this post.
I’m fairly new to AE (only been using it for about a month, maybe a little longer) after having used Premiere forever and a day.
I have a project which was edited together in Premiere 6.5 and then imported into After Effects. (No filters/effects were applied in Premiere, other than transitions, which weren’t preserved by AE anyway so they were rebuilt in AE).
The footage is a live video of a stage show which was performed by a local theater group. It was a two camera shoot so I am cutting between two different sources.
The first camera (I’ll call it camera A) was a Panasonic which does in-camera 16:9 (not “cropped”). The second camera (Camera B) was a Sony which was fitted with a Century Optics 16:9 lens thus squeezing a 16:9 image into its regular 4:3 frame for later “unsqueezing”.
The footage was imported into Premiere and edited, all two hours and forty minutes of it. (Long show). The Panasonic (camera A) footage, when imported into Premiere, was automatically “tagged” by Premiere as being 16:9 footage w/a pixel aspect ratio of 1.200. The Sony stuff (camera B) shows as 0.9 aspect ratio; however w/the project settings in Premiere set to NTSC Widescreen 16:9 everything previewed fine, ratio-wise.
The project was imported into AE, where the Camera A footage was set to be interpreted as D1/DV NTSC Widescreen (1.2) with “Separate Fields” set to “Lower Field First”.
These same interpret settings were used for the Camera B footage, so that the 4:3 image would be interpreted as a compressed 16:9 image to match the first camera’s footage (Camera B was filmed w/a 16:9 lens, after all). Not a problem, it looked fine during editing in AE, even during RAM preview the aspect ratios matched & were correct.
The composition settings in AE were:
Preset: NTSC DV Widescreen, 720 x 480
Pixel Aspect Ratio: D1/DV NTSC Widescreen
Framerate: 29.97
Resolution: Full
Now here’s where it gets interesting.
The 16:9 footage from the Panasonic is not perfect 16:9; although the frame dimensions are correct, the Panasonic’s so-called “in-camera” widescreen actually distorts the image – everything looks slightly stretched horizontally in 16:9. This can be corrected by “re-squishing” the image a bit in AE – using Transform to shrink the width of the image down to 93% of it’s width corrects the overstretch. However this leaves empty space at the left and right of the 16:9 work area/frame. Not a problem – I created black matte bars to fill in the space on either side and put this in an adjustment layer at the top of the project so that those same bars would appear over the footage from the Sony (even though I didn’t need to squeeze the camera B footage – the 16:9 lens worked like a charm…the black bars just cover the outer parts of camera B’s picture), and everything would match. (A royal pain in the arse, but it worked, and those outer edges will most likely be lost to overscan on a television anyway).
The rest of the project was taken up with color correction, some clone tool painting (some of the camera B scenes needed to be rotated (again, with Transform) to adjust for slightly off-kilter camera angles, and this left blank areas at the edges which needed to be filled in) and the usual gamma/contrast adjustments. The project was originally being done at 8bpc color, but before it was rendered I changed that setting to 16 bpc. Once the whole beast was done I rendered it to DV using the built in codec, with everything set to the highest possible settings:
Quality=Best,
Resolution=Full (I set this to render every 1 pixel, I would assume this is also what “Full” means)
Size: 720 x 480
Frame Blending: off
Field Render: Lower Field first
Motion Blur: Off for all layers
The Output Module says it is based on “lossless”. The settings listed are:
Format: Video for Windows movie
Output info: Microsoft DV
Spatial Quality= 100
Key frame every 1 frames
Embedding: off
Channels: RGB
Depth: Millions of colors
Color: Premultiplied
Final size: 720 x 480
In the Timeline, Layer Quality for all layers is set to Best.
The first hour and 12 minutes of the video took 50 hours to render. And once it was done I looked at it and here’s the problem.
It looks terrible.
The whole thing is blurry. Or “soft”, I should probably say. The cameras used were not HD, but the raw footage is still much sharper than the final output from AE. MUCH sharper. Everything now looks dull. Why? This is only one extra generation (no rendering was done with Premiere). I find it hard to believe that the DV codec included with AE 6.0 is this bad (??!??) especially after the amount of money I’ve spent on this software.
The most telling verdict was when a female friend of mine looked at the rendered footage and said “The original looked a lot shinier and new.”
So I am stuck. I’m not going to go ahead and render the other hour-and-whatever of the video until I can determine why the footage looks so dull and soft/blurred. I’ve laid out all the details above, so I am really hoping and praying that someone can point me in the right direction and I can fix this.
Thanks in advance…