Adobe Community: Poor quality after days of rendering (AE CS5)

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1. TimeRemapper,

Aug 3, 2010 1:53 PM in reply to timtro

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First, can you give a link to the exact project that you purchased?

9 hours for a 2 minute project isn't totally insane, depending on the nature of the project. As many folks here can attest to, 9 hours for a 10 second project used to be the norm!

What kind of files did you use as replacements (all specifics...frame size, frame rate, codec, etc...)? Are you rendering to a local drive? A network drive? What kind of connection are you using to your render drive? Are you rendering to a different drive than your project file and source files are located on?

You don't need to RAM preview prior to rendering. With 6 cores, you should have more RAM if you wanted to make the most out of your processors. You may want to consider limiting the number of processors to 3 or 4.

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2. timtro,

Aug 3, 2010 2:11 PM in reply to TimeRemapper

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TimeRemapper,

Here's the project: http://videohive.net/item/photo-album/94595

I have it running on 5 of the 6 processors using 13 GB of the RAM.

Rendering to local SATA drive, same as the source files.

I have no problem with the 9 hours, but I do have a problem with 3 days and

a jumpy mess as the result.

The images I switched out are mostly smaller than the ones in the sampler

and about the same as the scanned pictures I used in my trial run.

Should I try to export to my Premiere project or export to a file to bring

back into Pr? (added to video interview). If I export it, it needs to be 720

for standard DVD - What is the best format and settings for that? AVI? MOV?

MP4? Obviously what I selected was outside of what the machine could

adequately generate.

Tim

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3. TimeRemapper,

Aug 3, 2010 2:45 PM in reply to timtro

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Just because the images are smaller does not necessarily mean that they're easier to process. In what format are your replacement images?

Also, you mention export. You should be using the Render Queue, not the "Export" function under the File menu to generate your rendered file. Are you using the Render Queue? As for settings, you will probably be fine using the (default) Lossless output module template. If your project has audio, make sure that you enable the Audio Output checkbox.

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4. timtro,

Aug 3, 2010 3:03 PM in reply to TimeRemapper

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The replacement images are JPG the same as the ones I used the first time.

I started a QuickTime render now and it says 20 hours, but I've come to

learn it will probably take less than that. The one that came out really

good only took 9 hours, though.

Yes, I am using the Composition -> "make movie" -> render cue> custom

QuickTime.

Tim

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5. Mylenium,

Aug 3, 2010 11:03 PM in reply to timtro

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Are we perhaps facing a situation where you inadvertently habve enabled OpenGL rendering for final output? This would wreak havoc with a project such as yours... Other than that I can only assume that there may be some issue with your Quicktime install or that the project itself uses some feature (layer styles?) that may produce artifacts due to how AE's render order works.

Mylenium

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6. Andrew Yoole,

Aug 4, 2010 1:21 AM in reply to timtro

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timtro wrote:

At high quality 1080 AVI, it took 52 hours and the result was a jittery poor quality mess.

Was it actually faulty, or was your system simply unable to play back the rendered file because it was so large? Don't rely on quality playback from uncompressed/lossless files unless you have very fast RAID drives.

timtro wrote:
So then I rendered the project again at 720 as an MP4 and it only took 37 hours, but this time it was even worse and even more unusable.Same machien, same memory assignment, same project file.

When working with intensive renders, never compress your material in AE. If the compression settings are wrong, or need to be changed later, you have to re-render everything. Render to an uncompressed/lossless format (Quicktime Animation codec at 100% quality, for example) and use an external compression tool like Quicktime Pro/Apple Compressor etc to make compressed, viewable versions.

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7. timtro,

Aug 4, 2010 5:26 AM in reply to Andrew Yoole

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Andrew,

What you say makes a lot of sense to me. The finished file was 330 MB for a

1:44 video and it was generated using "lossless". I'm not running RAID

because my projects don't use all that much space. Most of the drives are

1.5 SATA 7200 but the one with this project may be an older (350 GB) drive.

Does that mean that if I put the "jittery" file on a CD or rendered it in

Premiere that it might still play OK? My video card is the recommended

Nvidia GTX285 - 2 TB. Is the card or my monitor a limitation?

The OS and programs are installed on the main drive and all the working

files are on added SATA drives.

Tim Trott

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8. Todd_Kopriva,

Aug 4, 2010 6:00 AM in reply to timtro

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Here's an FAQ entry that addresses some of what Andrew was talking about regarding playback of uncompressed files:

"FAQ: Why does my output file not play smoothly, and why is my output file huge?"

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9. timtro,

Aug 5, 2010 6:33 PM in reply to Todd_Kopriva

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I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all who provided advice, assistance and information. I would like to report my project was a success. The quality is excellent. It did take several days to render a 2 minute project but the result was most satisfactory. Again, my thanks to all here who provided guidance, advice and information. This forum is a real asset to the Adobe community.

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Poor quality after days of rendering (AE CS5)

Aug 3, 2010 1:18 PM

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