Exported video pixelated even with 'Continuously Rasterise' selected.

[Hanmac1]

Hi I'm really stumped with this one. I have created a simple animation using vector files I created in Illustrator. It looks fine in After effects and I have Continious Raster selected. However everytime I export it becomes pixelated and I don't know why.

[Martin_Ritter]

We neither since you didn't provide any export settings.

I guess you exported the animation with h264 codec and a low bitrate. If so, increase the bit rate or export using a different codec, knowing that h264 is a high compressing codec.

*Martin

[Hanmac1]

Hi, these are the settings I used and it was set to high bitrate.

But even when I try different settings, I get the same result.

[Dave Merchant]

You're exporting at 482x570 pixels (strange, but hey...it's your party). The "screenshot" you posted is much larger, so you've scaled up during playback. Can't do that and expect it to be pixel-perfect!

[Hanmac1]

It hasn't been scaled up these are the composition settings.

[Martin_Ritter]

You should make sure, that your video player is displaying the export file without any scaling. Since you are not exporting FHD, but your monitor is likely to have FHD resolution, you might watched the animation full screen, instead of windowed.

Another source of mistakes could be, that you did not proberly preview the animation in AE and it actual does not look good there. So, make sure to view the comp you are exporting at full resolution, at 100% view scaling, with all effects on. Check, if preview settings - resolution is set to auto or full.

If you put the comp into queue and bring it to AME from there, make sure the output settings in queue are proberly set up. You can actual switch of effects and lower resolution there. So check, if everything is at highest quality and that you are not using any proxies.

If everything is fine,VBR 10-12 Mbit might be simply not enough to get those narrow lines encoded in a good quality. Try CBR 20 Mbit and go up until the image is clear, or go down to lower file size.

When working with H264, you shouldn't expect the a crystal clear quality. You are always loosing information, that is how the codec works.

*Martin

[Rick Gerard]

I see a couple of red flags in your design. Here are some basic guidelines for preparing vector artwork for video:

• Thin lines, lines less than 2 points (pixels) thick must be perfectly aligned with the pixel grid and not move if you expect them to stay sharp. This can be achieved in AI by snapping to the pixel grid in the setup
• Any movement in thin lines needs to be in even numbers of pixels per frame to prevent antialiasing from making the line thickness and color change as the lines move
• Fully saturated colors against fully white or black backgrounds do not handle MPEG color compression well. You hav.e to give the colors somewhere to go by setting the brightness and/or saturation levels about 4 to 10 points above black (0) or below white (256)
• Custom frame sizes for comps destined for MPEG (h.264) delivery should be avoided because the video will be resized to a standard size and thin lines will fall apart - you are using a very odd custom frame size that does not conform to any standard media player frame size.

It is also important that you judge your video quality with the media player at 100% scale. Thin lines in a 4K video that is being shown on an HD monitor will fall apart and look bad. The only thing you can do about that is to make sure that your design is suitable for scaling down.

The first thing I would do with this project is to make sure that you have the frame size set properly. If it must be that custom size then your best chance for maximum quality is to use the Render Cue and the default Lossless Output Module preset to render a visually lossless frame-based production master. That will give you what you see in After Effects. You can then drop that production master into the Adobe Media Encoder. The resulting file will be as good as it is going to get using MPEG compression.