Scaling down composition loses quality

[Stephen Barrante]

This is an atypical situation that has us pretty baffled. We have a "banner" animation that was originally created at 720x1080. All the content in the animation is solids, live text layers and a couple of photos. The content is beautiful and sharp when we render it out at 100% size. We have to kick out a set of videos at 320x480 which is a proportional size, and each time we scale the comps / animations down the quality goes to hell.

The 3 methods we've tried are:

1) First, simply scaling them in AME during render

2) Creating a new render comp for export at the smaller size, dropping the original composition into it and scaling it down to fit the smaller comp size

3) Repeating #2 expect enabling "continuously rasterize" switch

We manually set the quality in the composition settings and viewport to "Full", just to be sure. All 3 methods produce renders that have fuzzy type, images and vector graphics. Scaling down does not usually produce this kind of problem. The only thing we haven't tried is to parent the ENTIRE animation to a single null, but that's a rather messy task as we have layers previously parented to others, and for a dozen or so banners is more effort than should be required imho.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thank you.

Stephen

[OussK · Accepted solution]

Can you first post some screenshot also what player you use?

anyway please check this post their are some information to same issue.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2394895

[angie_taylor]

Please tell us what settings you are usining in media encoder?

[Stephen Barrante]

We've taken a pretty comprehensive attempt at exporting the videos in various ways both from AE and AME. We've exported as Lossless, Match Size - High-bitrate mp4, Quicktime ProRes LT, etc. We also performed a base test with a native 320x480 comp and text against the same backgrounds, with little or no improvement.

So after trying several different variations on how to solve for this, we've concluded that it's likely a player / display issue. This was confirmed by opening up the 320x480 clip in Photoshop and viewing at 100% without the retina compensation. When viewing the video in Quicktime player it will not allow the videos to scale smaller than 576px high - which is completely bizarre. I still have Quicktime 7, and while that shows the video at "normal" size, it's still compensating for the high-resolution screen. During this forced enlargement the videos soften up.

[OussK]

that's exactly what i explain in the link of post i already send it to you in the first reply so retina display cause low quality preview on the low quality video specially with quick time player X, so if you locking to post your render file online don't worry it will look perfect on the browser.

[Stephen Barrante]

@OussK - agreed. Although we needed to do our due diligence to confirm that was the case. Appreciate your link to the post to help us validate that.

@DaveLaRonde – That was the first approach we took, re #2 and 3 in the original post. Thought that was going to solve the problem, but as we've discovered, it didn't have anything to do with the scaling or compression.

[Dave_LaRonde]

It doesn't sound like you tried making a smaller comp in AE, nesting the larger comp in it, then scaling the nested layer to fit the smaller comp.