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# 1 07-09-2014 , 09:39 PM
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After Effects Rendering

Hi all.

was wondering if any SM users have used after effects much to produce videos of animations they have rendered out of Maya??

I have been doing this (or trying to) quite a bit recently, but can never manage to produce a smooth video out of After Effects, theyre always choppy and stuttering.
I have tried different framerates for compositions (30 frames a sec and 24), and different output video formats (quicktimes, windows movies etc...)

Does anyone have any tips on what works best?

Frames rendered out of Maya have always been JPEGS...is this ok for animations? Ive been wondering if this could be the issue though i don't really see why it should be. A friend of mine who i've been doing some projects with has ended up using premiere to render out videos of the same animations, and they're always smooth.

Anybody have any tips on what possible issues could be causing videos to be choppy, or settings they like to use to get good vids out of AFX? The after effects work isnt very complicated, im not adding tons of shape layers and particle effects or anything, just basic colour and ao layers from maya and a bit of colour correction...

??

Ben




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# 2 07-09-2014 , 10:48 PM
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Does your project framerate in AE match your Maya framerate settings?


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# 3 08-09-2014 , 05:17 PM
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I generally render iff or openEXR out of Maya depending on if I want 8-bit or 32-bit. I render out of AE with H.264 selected as the format. When you say choppy or stuttering, do you mean that it looks like your media player is having a hard time keeping up? Or that it is consistently juttery looking. What are your file size outputs?

# 4 08-09-2014 , 07:09 PM
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Hi Gen, Hi Stwert.....

Thanks both for your replies.

Gen, yes the frame rates have been matching up.

Stwert, yes.... I think you have hit the nail on the head....
I've just been round my friends rendering out one of our animations, and he's a little more tech savvy than I am and it would seem it is probably just my media player/s and/or CPU having trouble just playing the vids as they are very large file sizes. His computer is much newer and faster than mine, and his rig handles them fine. I'm overdue an upgrade on my hardware.

Eg the last video I rendered out of afx was just short of 800 mb.
And I've rendered out larger also recently.
It's crazy.... We rendered out a video from afx, 33 seconds long, and it was 2.1 gig.
We put it in premiere and exported straight out as h264, and the same video was 50mb, no drop in quality.




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# 5 08-09-2014 , 07:27 PM
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33sec * 24fps * 1280px * 720px * 24bit/px
/ 8bit/byte / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = ~2.1GB (not crazy at all, very logical user added image)

Lossless is rendering every pixel exactly at it appears in an image for each frame. The only reason to render out from AE as lossless is if you're going to be doing further work with it.

# 6 09-09-2014 , 12:25 AM
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Watch the bitrates on your video encoding, too high and your PC will probably choke trying to play it back.

As for rendering 3D scenes to jpeg, there is less wiggle room in post since it's a lossy format, not great for source material. Even for 8bit there are better options(tif comes to mind). Though I usually have Maya output to 32 bit exr and as Stwert mentioned, H.264 video is pretty safe(you can get away with lower bit rates and the resulting smaller file size yet still have good quality). I never compress anything to jpeg unless it's an image for the internet.


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# 7 09-09-2014 , 08:43 AM
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Points noted folks, thankyou.
Will keep an eye out for those options.

I've been doing some basic-ish visualisations for a public sculptor that is a family friend of a colleague of mine, bits that he can use to help him pitch his ideas to arts trusts/councils etc, and will be doing so for the near future at least, so these points will come in handy...




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# 8 11-10-2014 , 07:45 AM
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Nice work, good to hear you're able to enjoy doing woodworking again. I love the heart candy dish, it's fantastic.


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