Reducing AE comp size becomes pixelated.

[Mhowie]

Hi, 

I have been making ads for a business I run with AE, but I'd say I'm still a beginner. I usually make ads at 1080x1080px but have started making display ads at 300x50px (obviously a lot smaller). When importing my assets into the smaller comp, they're not a great quality at 100% zoom, and pixelated at 200% zoom. I exported one of the ads at 300x50 and it was blurry. I have tried resizing the assets/logos/images externally and importing them which didn't work. I have tried to change the comp settings, tried adding to the render queue and changing settings etc. Also I created everything in a bigger comp which was clean, then put that comp within the smaller comp and reduced the scale but nothing has worked. The text I have created within AE is also pixelated. 

I was wondering if anyone had any advice, or if I'm just being an idiot. 

Thanks 🙂

[David Arbor]

There's nothing out of the ordinary here. 300x50 px is an incredibly low resolution, so you can only evaluate the quality at 100%. When you export and play the video back I'm betting that it's being blown up to fit your media player window. You have to look at everything at 100%, but yes, even then text is going to look terrible since there's barely any room for that amount of detail. I would recommend using larger text with a sans serif font. Any small details like serifs won't resolve clearly.

[Mhowie]

Thanks for the reply, 

Yeah you're right now looking into it furthur. 

Thanks for the advice. 

[Rick Gerard]

After Effects is a tool for creating visual effects and motion graphics for video. You can take a sledgehammer and try and force it to create efficient web graphics but it is inefficient and can only produce decent quality graphics if there are only pixels in your composition and you purchase one or more 3rd party tools. You should be using Animate. That is the tool designed specifically to create the kind of script-based HTML code required for interactive, high quality, fast loading, platform-independent, dynamic content for the web.  

As far as resolution and pixels go, there are no inches in video or on the web. It's only pixels. If you want high-resolution animations you need lots of pixels because high resolution means lots of pixels. Neither of these images is high resolution, They are both exactly the same even though one of them is 1 PPI and the other is 9999PPI. They both look exactly the same on the web or used in any video app. 

The only way these images will look different is if you load them in a program designed to print things like Microsft Word. You should be able to figure out which one will be smaller than the head of a pin.

[Nathalie5E13]

Hi I'm having a similar issue but in reverse (larger comp, scaling down). I inherited a 4001x2551 composition that I'm tasked to scale down to 1920x1080 but when I do all the graphics, shapes and text appear pixelated. Is there a work around this? I'm hoping to just update the graphics and turn this around quickly without having to start the project over from scratch. 

[David Arbor]

What resolution are you displaying your comp at, Quarter, Third, Half, Full, or something else? If your Composition panel is zoomed to 100% and your the preview resolution is set to Full (both of these options are at the bottom of the Composition panel, then assuming you don't have a couple Draft settings enabled in the timeline, you will see the full resolution. If you post a full screen screenshot of After Effects that will help shed a little more light on what's going on.