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1. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
shooternz Sep 20, 2009 6:57 PM (in response to Jack Banatoni)Do the scaling in AEFX from an oversized PSD.
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2. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Harm Millaard Sep 21, 2009 12:26 AM (in response to shooternz)Are you certain that 'under the hood' PR uses a different engine with less quality than AE? I wonder if that is correct.
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3. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JSS1138 Sep 21, 2009 6:19 AM (in response to Harm Millaard)I don't have any quality issues using Premiere for this, working in standard definition.
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4. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Jack Banatoni Sep 21, 2009 1:59 PM (in response to Harm Millaard)Harm, is there any "scientific" method for testing the difference? Or should I just eyeball it? After Effects isn't as sluggish when scaling, but I don't think that necessarily means the quality is better. It would be a convenience to just do this in Premiere, but I don't want to sacrifice quality, either.
thanks,
-JB
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5. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Harm Millaard Sep 21, 2009 2:20 PM (in response to Jack Banatoni)There are scientific approaches to measure the possible differences, but it is way beyond what most would use, if only because of the cost of the measurement equipment. 'Eyeballing' it would be my approach.
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6. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
shooternz Sep 21, 2009 2:20 PM (in response to Jack Banatoni)Are you certain that 'under the hood' PR uses a different engine with less quality than AE? I wonder if that is correct.
I do not know if there is a different render engine but I do know that I can work with an "oversized" psd more easily in AEFX than I can in PremPro. ie a psd of a dimension larger / much larger than my project dimension.
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7. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JBrown321 Sep 22, 2009 7:04 AM (in response to Jack Banatoni)From my experience, I have noticed that AE scales video or stills better than PP. Alot of times I have to downscale 16:9 video to 4:3 and in PP it's not bad but it's soft. I take it into AE and render out and much cleaner and more crisp. Also the motion animations look much better in AE than in PP as well. I don't know why there is a difference, but AE seems to be more precise with this.
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8. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Colin Brougham Sep 22, 2009 7:24 AM (in response to JBrown321)Absolutely, and "precise" is the right way to describe it. After Effects works with subpixel precision, meaning that it can subdivide a pixel into even smaller increments--specifically, 1/65,536th of a pixel. Any spatial properties, like position or scale, use subpixel precision when transformations are applied. As a result, effects such as scaling a video or a photo will look sharper, and motion will look smoother if animation is created. I'm not positive--as I've found no evidence supporting or to the contrary--but I don't believe that Premiere's scaling and motion "engine" uses subpixel precision. Technically, then, After Effects is more capable, but practically, I'm not sure it always makes a big difference.
Read about subpixel rendering in After Effects here...
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9. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Jack Banatoni Sep 22, 2009 7:46 AM (in response to Colin Brougham)How does this work if I do the scaling in After Effects and then use Dynamic Link to copy it back on my Premiere timeline? After Effects would still be the render engine used, correct?
I haven't really used DL before. Is it practical/stable enough to do this in a project that would have about 300 motion stills?
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10. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JBrown321 Sep 22, 2009 8:21 AM (in response to Jack Banatoni)I'm not sure if AE's render engine is used, but I think there is a good chance that PP is now taking over when using the DL. I just use the DL for a reference, you will eventually have to render. I would just render it out of AE when you get it ready. DL can really eat up system resources. I would use AE but that's just me. It all depends on how complex or simple you want it to be.
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11. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JSS1138 Sep 22, 2009 11:41 AM (in response to Colin Brougham)I don't believe that Premiere's scaling and motion "engine" uses subpixel precision.
The Time Warp effect in Premiere does, so it's at least possible Motion does as well. No data to confirm either way, though.
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12. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
Jack Banatoni Oct 3, 2009 8:21 AM (in response to JSS1138)All right, this thread has convinced me to scale images in After Effects instead of Premiere. The convenience of scaling 300+ images in Premiere would be great, but the general consensus seems to be that it couldn't hurt to just do this in After Effects.
That said, what is the typical workflow? Make each image a new composition in AE, set my keyframes, then export from AE, then import to Pr? Dynamic Link would be pointless if it wouldn't use the AE engine for scaling (does it?).
My project is HDV 720 30p. What would be the suggested export settings from AE?
Thanks for everyone's feedback,
JB
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13. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JSS1138 Oct 3, 2009 11:02 AM (in response to Jack Banatoni)the general consensus seems to be that it couldn't hurt to just do this in After Effects.
It won't hurt image quality. But I personally doubt it will offer any visible improvements, either. But it sure does seem like a whole lot of extra work.
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14. Re: Scaling - Premiere or After Effects CS4?
JBrown321 Oct 3, 2009 11:03 AM (in response to Jack Banatoni)What I would do is edit your film just like you normaly would with your images(don't worry about size and animation yet), then in After Effects import the premiere pro project and you will have each edit you made in Premiere a seperate layer in After Effects. Also remember to interperate your footage correctly after it has been imported if it is interlaced, otherwise AE will not render the fields in the video by default. Youb can set the render setting to lower field first, but that will make everything interlaced.




