.mov jumping around in preview

[parish10505885]

I'm a complete newbie to AE so this could be a simple fix. I am creating a short edit using various .mov clips i took on a trip. When i play them in the preview window the video wildly jumps around to different spots in the video, stuttering if you will back and forth in time. For some reason the stuttering disappears when I change the preview resolution to one quarter. This appears in the render as well. Any help would be much appreciated!

[Dave_LaRonde]

Well, then, don't use After Effects!  Use a video editing application like Premiere!  You're editing video!

You're trying to get from Point A to Point B in an F-22 Raptor when a used Volkswagen Golf would do a far better job.

[parish10505885]

I installed Premiere Pro and the video skips in it as well. I have played the clips in windows media player and they play fine without stuttering.  Any ideas?

[Dave_LaRonde]

None!  What kind of useful information have you supplied other than to say it doesn't work?   What kind of footage is this?  The media container?  The codec?  If it's old, is it footage shot at 24p, which needs 3:2 pulldown removed?  Was it shot on a phone without a special app to force it to shoot fixed frame rates, which has NO hope of ever working well in professional applications?  Is there a frame rate mismatch?

That's just the stuff off the top of my head.  Who knows what further information will reveal?

This video stuff ain't as straightforward as I suspect you may have thought.....

[parish10505885]

The video is shot in 1920x1080 at 29.97 fps .mov at a data rate of 8716kbps.  It was indeed from a mobile device so maybe this is where i'm going wrong?

[Tom5E1A]

Are you alright Dave? Every reply I see from you on this forum seems angry and impatient...

People don't know everything. You might be a video expert, but I'm sure there are things you don't know about.

Some people don't know how to ask a question if they're new to the industry.

As an expert, it's your job to make people feel open to learning right? Otherwise, why are you even here? To make yourself feel superior or to help people? 

[Rick Gerard]

Spend some time with the User Guide. Don't waste time digging through YouTube for tutorials until you have a good understanding of how the UI works and what a reasonable workflow looks like. Most of the tutorials on YouTube are presented by enthusiasts, most don't adequately explain the workflow, a lot of them are nothing more than recipes that have been copied from somebody else that only works with the specific shot used in the tutorial. You have to vet your trainers. There's an awfully lot of very bad advice given.

Previews are dependent on system resources, comp frame rate, comp frame size, Preview Panel settings, and Comp Panel resolution. The first thing you should do is set Comp Resolution to Auto. If you can't get a good preview, set the Magnification Ratio to 50% or less. If you still want a longer preview set the Preview Panel to skip 1 or 2 frames. DO NOT change the frame rate in the Preview Panel - it should always be set to Auto.

I'm also concerned that you said "I am creating a short edit using various .mov clips I took on a trip." After Effects is NOT a video editing app. You should not ever use AE to edit a video. After Effects is a visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing app designed specifically to create shots and occasionally short sequences that cannot be created in a video editing app like Premiere Pro. Most of my comps contain 10 or 20 layers, and they are under 7 seconds and almost always contain only one shot. On rare occasions, I will create a sequence that is not longer than one sentence or phrase or 4 bars of music when After Effects is required for the animation of motion graphics. That's it. Trying to edit a video in After Effects is not only frustrating, but it takes longer to render, is more likely to have rendering problems, is incredibly difficult to re-cut, and is really a waste of time.