Adding Saphire s_halftone effect to an adjustment layer and then exporting, looks really bad

[Milos29318131fiwi]

it looks great in AE Program Monitor but as soon as I export the video it has some weird parts which are completely destroyed in quality and half blurred, Il try to post a pictures of both examples below, with an without halftone.

The brighter image is with halftone and the one is not, you will clearly see what I mean by quality being destroyed after aplying the effect..

I really like the look the halftone gives to your footage, and I would really like to use it in future projects.. (also, I've tried exporting only with halftone layer on, all other adjustment layers off (noise, glow etc..) and it still gives the same bad result, whole footage destroyed.. Im working in a 4k sequence 32bpc and export at 15bitrate. Please help..

[Warren Heaton]

To maintain the appearance of a Composition while the project is set to 32-bits per channel, we need to export to a format that supports 32-bits per channel.  When setting up a render, we can check Output Modile Options > Main Options > Video Output > Depth to see which bit depths are supported by the current format. 

H264 is limited to Millions of Colors (or 8-bits per channel).  As such, you want to work with the project set to 8-bits per channel as well.

From you screenshot, it looks like you are also getting some macro-blocking.  The bit rate for 4K (2160) should be 40Kbps.  15Kbps is for 2k (1080).

[Milos29318131fiwi]

Thank you very much for you answer! You saved my day!

I changed the export from H.264 to Quicktime and set Trillions of colors and it turned out great at export, it looks the same as in After Effects program monitor!

(left the comp at 32bpc because when I set to 8bpc video gets some weird lines from glow and vignette)

[Milos29318131fiwi]

Update for Premiere Pro also. In After Effects when you take high quality animations with a lot of glow, halftone, noise etc.. and export them as QuickTime so you lose no quality in them, and after that you put that final .mov file in Premiere to merge it with the rest of the video, but then you export from Premiere and your complete animation gets ruined by Premiere export compression, there is a solution that I use right now and it saves the day for me! 

I export the video from Premiere pro as QuickTime also (tried everything else, nothing works), then your final video will be .mov and it will keep full animation quality, but it will have enormous file size (around 8GB per one minute of 4K video).

After you export it, it is going to have like 70GB file size for 10 minute video. After that put that video into HandBrake (https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php) and under 'preset' drop menu, select Super HQ 2160p 60 4k HEVC Surround and click start. It will bring your video size by 7-8 times so your final video will be around 10GB and saved as MP4. It losses less then 1-2% quality, it is very hard to notice any difference, and the file size is 7-8 times smaller. Then you can upload the video to your prefered transfer method without waiting for 6+ hours to upload and send it to your client! 

This is the method that I found out today and it is so good for high quality animations, but with normal file size!

[Warren Heaton]

@Milos29318131fiwi 

Thank you for sharing what worked for you.

There's a very, very important workflow consideration to take note of here when it comes to maintaining picture quality and sound quality throughout our workflow from start to finish.

H.264 and HEVC/H.265 are great delivery formats but not strong choices for source footage, edit settings, or edited master settings.

Based on your delivery needs, I would have opted to work at 16-bpc in After Effects and either import the corresponding After Effects project into Premiere Pro or, more likely, render to Apple ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 4444 (with alpha) at 16-bpc in Adobe Media Encoder. These files would then be used in a Premiere Pro timeline with Video Previews set to ProRes 422 HQ, followed by exporting an edited master in Apple ProRes 422 HQ. This workflow ensures consistently high quality while also taking advantage of Smart Rendering in Premiere Pro for faster exports when using the "Match sequence preview settings" preset.

If the ProRes edited master can be uploaded—even though it’s a large file—then upload that. Otherwise, encode the edited master to the required delivery format, keeping in mind that many delivery formats do not support 16-bpc, may have lower color sampling (4:2:0 instead of 4:4:4 or 4:2:2), and require careful selection of bitrates to maintain picture quality for first-generation delivery formats, whether it’s MPEG-2, H.264, H.265, or another format.

Just to reiterate: Yes, working with settings optimized for editing and maintaining picture quality means dealing with larger file sizes.