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Participant
January 29, 2023
Question

Floating point clips gives a black screen?

  • January 29, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 246 views

Hi. So it's really hard to explain so i'll try my best lol. Basically i'm making a music video for a customer. He sent me both footage with trillions of colors, and footage with "floating point" (i don't know whats the difference). The footage with trillions of colors do preview and can be edited etc.. but the ones with floating point just gives a black screen. The worst is that it gives a black screen to the whole composition, even if theres overlays or footage etc above it. Heres a video to explain it better. 

 

at 0:40, i really don't know why but it previewed the floating point footage ?? and then i tried with another footage and it gave me a black screen. I don't know if I did something to fix at 0:40 but yeah i tried multiple times and it would always give me a black screen. Before recording I tried reinstalling after effects, changing the color depth to 32 bits (float), 16, 8. I also tried switching GPU processing to mercury software processing. 

I'm running After Effects CC 2020
8 GB Ram
i7
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2 replies

Mylenium
Legend
January 30, 2023

It simply means your hardware acceleration is inadequate. Check the relevant settings in the preferences and update your graphics driver.

 

Mylenium 

Community Expert
January 30, 2023

HVEC is not really considered a production format. Neither is H.264. Both can have problems decoding because they are highly compressed, can predict as many as 2/3 of the frames instead of using the original pixels, and are easily corrupted. Your floating pint version is just not properly decoding. It has very little to do with After Effects because there are at least a dozen ways that format can be compressed. Your Project is set to 16-bit. Setting it to 32-bit may solve the problem, but I would not count on it. 

 

Production formats are lossless, and every frame is a real frame. ProRez is probably the most common production format.