4k dynamic link AE comp scales down in very poor render quality (jagged edges) when exporting in HD

I am constantly struggling with this issue.  Just now I brought in 2 AE clips with dynamic link.  The AE project and Premiere Pro project were both 4K 60 FPS.  My After Effects(dynamic link) elements have horrible aliasing when I render the final project to an HD preset in media encoder (with Max Render Quality enabled).  If I export the same Premiere Pro project to a high quality 4K preset first everything looks great and I can down convert that file to HD.   I have had MGRTS cause this issue as well.

It's wicked. Always some misteries with software I guess 🙄 Lemme know how it went!

What? You got usable results withs "scale to frame size" rather than "set to frame size"? That is very curious I need to try this and will report back.

I never would have guessed "scale to frame size" actually scales anything different under the hood!

I always always use "set" because I need to know when I'm above or below 100% of the source res, because I usually try to never upscale anything beyond 100. So it's possible that "set to frame size" is causing the issue not scaling in general.

The weird problem with this is I wasn't even scaling up anything. I was scaling *down* from 4k to HD. Scaling down footage never caused me any visible quality loss in any software. Except with dynmic link clips in Premiere.

Hi Heiko, here's what worked for me:

- Have 4K video footage in a 4K timeline

- Have FHD dynamic link AE motion graphics

- Set clips in time line to be "Scaled to Frame Size" and not set it to framesize (=200%)

- I got proper scaling this time.

Hope this helps.

This is still here and should be filed under [BUGS] by adobe 🙎

Wowza.

Just want to jump in and say I have never seen this before until today, and wow its a nasty bug or issue. 

Had a 5k drone shot I did some quick paint & roto in and when I brought it into premeire and scaled it to 40% the diagonal lines on the building looked like like a little staircase. 

I fixed it by pre-comping the AE comp to 1080 and bringing that in but I don't know why AE comps are scaled like this when no other footage item is. I think they probably did it as an optimization to make Mogrts render faster a few versions ago and this is a bad side effect. 

Ugly jaggies! Scale 5.1K drone to 1080p. AE Dyanmic link. 

No jaggies (original shot in timeline) 5k scaled to 1080 .mp4 file.

I'm glad I caught this before shipping!  Yeah the workaround seems to be to Do a pre-comp and scale before bringing it into your timeline but I can't ever remeber having this issue before. Setting high quality playback or maxQ doesn't do anything, and rendering it in the timeline also keeps the same bad quality. Not sure about final export. 

Totally agreed they need to rebuild this part of the app.

Premiere uses Lanczos scaling, I believe. Which supposedly in their testing works best for most images. Though many experienced users disagree.

I remember wanting to post about this. We used to do some projects where inscreens where comped onto a plate but keeping everything quick to adjust we used the plates only as guide layers in AE and dynamic link the composite to PR with only rendering the inscreen itself. Especially for offline editing this is practical because playback for camera files is simply much faster directly in PR. But we quickly realized that Dynamic Link scaling is pretty messed up as you show here and we comp in camera res instead of delivery res because that's simply how compositing is done best.

From my own judgement it looks like Dynamic Link scaling uses nearest neighbor or some other non-practical but perhaps cheap to render scaling algorithm which doesn't match the one PR or AE uses. Inside AE you have 3 options (which aren't even named for the user but I guess you can classify them as linear, nearest neighbor, and sharper).

What you perhaps could do is put the native res comp into an HD comp inside AE first and use that as the dynamic link clip. Not perfect but would allow linking instead of rendering out first.

Adobe has a long way to go in this regard. IMO they should throw away the Max Render Quality stuff. Scaling needs to be it's own dedicated management on both AE and PR so the user can have proper control over it similar to how Resolve and other apps handle it. And image processing should always be 32bit which I believe it isn't if that box isn't checked. But unless you have some odd reason not to want this I think all current day machines are more than fast enough to handle this.