Bad Quality after Video Importing?

Report · May 30, 2023

I've been trying to edit some videos together with some subtitles. The video footage belongs to screen recordings of my gameplay.
When importing the footage, I've used the match to footage thing but my footage looks like it's a painting?
I've then tried importing to Premier Pro, where there were no issues whatsoever. I did all the cutting in Premier but then I wanted to put the export into AE.
Same problem... I'm stumped. I've been researching and trying different exporting sizes and exporting with different codexes but I am lost. I've even tried installing a previous version of AE (tried 23.4, 23.3 and 23.2).

If anybody has any ideas, please tell me!

Here are some before pictures and after pictures of the footage so you can see the problem I'm dealing with. The quality is probably not going to be the same on the print screens as to what I am seeing on my screens but essentially, AE seems to be creating harsh divides between the colours and darkening the imaging.

Before AE

After AE

If the screenshots are a little difficult to see, I've got a video I uploaded here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv9TnOhFa4g

Compared to the quality when I edited a video 10 months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx1_JAw-Nsc&t=27s

Report · May 30, 2023

You are recompressing already compressed footage.
You are clearly not using any color management.
Your footage is extrenmely dark to begin with, further causing issues with compression.
There may be other inconsistencies in the captured footage like varying framerates.
You may do yourself a disservice by using all too fancy game settings with HDR rendering or other trickery which will never trtanslate to an 8bit format like MP4.

Take your pick. As far as AE is concerned everything is as it should be. You are just using a bad workflow and have wrong expectations. Of course you can improve some of that by using different settings and instating color management, but there will always be minor differences.

Mylenium

Report · May 31, 2023

I think you're onto something with the game footage being too fancy.. I've just now attempted another game footage and don't seem to have the problem with that one.
It's very confusing still because I've had no problems with using AE to edit my game footage until recently and I know I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what, but that's something to do with the game itself.

Thank you for your help 🙂