Premiere Pro/After Effects Composition Workflow

[TheWhimsicalSort]

Hello,

My brother and I are working on a project on Youtube, we usually descibe it as an Action Comic. There are frames for scenes, voices, sound effects, and music. Lately, we have been adding character movements with After Effects and importing the compositions into Premiere Pro (or creating an After Effects composition from the footage in Premiere Pro). But, we've been having some dificulty in the quality of the compositions when we export them in Premiere Pro (or Media Encoder, as we have been trying to export from that program lately). It seems that all of the animations are pixelated, even though they aren't when previewed in AE. We have check the resolution and frame size of the compositions in comparison to the exported video, and it seems like they should work just fine. We've been trying to make the frames large so that we can zoom and crop without any pixelation (most images being 4800x2700, as they are bitmap). We were wondering if the size of the file might have something to do with it.

We would appreciate any advice given! Thank you!

[R Neil Haugen]

What is the frame size of your sequences? Your exports? Your Ae comps if not created by sending to Ae from Pr?

Neil

[TheWhimsicalSort]

For export in Media Encoder we have been exporting the video at 720p 29.97fps, in Pr it is at 1080p 29.97fps, but the AE comps not sent from Pr are at 4800x2700 29.97fps. Does that help?

[R Neil Haugen]

What do you have set in the Edit/Preferences/Media dialog for Default Media Scaling ... ? Set to Framesize to me is the better option for most things.

And what bitrates are you using for your export? Also ... any reason you've gone down to 1280x720 for exports, from the 1920x1080 timeline? Out of curiosity ...

Neil

[TheWhimsicalSort]

We downsized the export because we realized that some of the other videos we have posted in the past for this series were 720p, only after importing the images and a good deal of the other content at 1080p, so to avoid too much work and to keep the videos congruent, we have been downsizing the video on export. This has been our first big project, so it's also us trying to figure out how to organize ourselves.

I checked the Media Preferences in Pr, it is "Set to frame size." I couldn't find the same option in AE. Our bitrate, from what is set up in Pr is VBR, 1 Pass 16mbps.

[TheWhimsicalSort]

Over the last weekend we tried turning the resolution to "full" on each of the AE comps (because we saw an article about a past error in communications of Pr and AE in how the AE comps were set) and it didn't seem to help.

Any new insights based on that information?

[Carlos Ziade]

what are your sequence settings inside Premiere Pro? If you are on a 1080 sequence and dynamically linking 

to a comp that you changed or pre-composed to 4k inside After Effects then that might be the issue...

Premiere Pro sequence settings and After Effects composition settings should match.

Are any of your dynamically linked premiere proclips nested as pre-comps

inside after effects then inserted in a 4K comp?

I can't really sort out your workflow, can you please share screenshots or a recorded screen grab on what 

you are doing exactly? Also, what are your export settings and preset in AME?

[TheWhimsicalSort]

The first screen shot is from AE, now the frame size is 4800x2700 and that is what the PP Sequence was before we brought it down to 1080p.

This is PP, the frame size is reflective of the current change, 1080p. But all compositions made at the size of 4800x2700 were linked when PP was still 4800x2700. They have been scaled 40% to fit the frame size of 1080p.

This is ME. We are exporting it in 720p because most of our previous YouTube videos are 720p and we wanted to keep them close to the same resolution.Final Export

This is the final export of the same AE comp. As you can hopefully see the line art of the character and in the background are jagged.

Thank you!

[MyerPj · Accepted solution]

I'm thinking you should finish the footage that goes to AE in AE. IE: Do 1080p comps in AE and do your zooming in AE from the big bitmaps. Then export / render an intermediate file from AE @ 1080p, you would use ProRes or Cineform for the intermediate. Then that goes into the timeline and plays well, etc since almost all the effects were done in AE and PP just needs to play those clips.

[TheWhimsicalSort]

Thank you MyerPj!

I'm not 100% sure I know what you meant, but you meantioned ProRes and Cineform so that made me look up a video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ujtYViMgsZU. I followed the process in this video and rendered the compositions in PP. I exported the video and it looks fantastic! So, whether or not that was what you meant, thank you! You at least got me looking in the right direction.

[Carlos Ziade]

you can also make great use of mogrts... but it depends on your worflow, if there are no

placeholders (image/video) to replace in premiere and you have pure motion graphics 

and text, you can export them as mogrts from after effects into premiere pro, where you

can even edit them in premiere pro.