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Final Cut Pro to After Effects questions

W

wing70301

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 25, 2007
26
0
Hello all,

I'm currently interning at a local commercial production company. They're all running Windows boxes with the whole Adobe editing suite. Well, my boss gets swamped with work and I volunteer to edit a commercial for him. The commercial involved green screen and other effects, so naturally I chose to use After Effects to do the job. So I did all the initial edits in FCP then used QuickTime Conversion to transfer the file over to AE. However, I'm really wary about this because there is a possible loss in quality. I really want to show my boss that Macs are more than capable at editing, and that I have the knowledge to continue to edit commercials for him so that he can actually keep up with his work load.

All this to ask, what is the best possible way to transfer movie files that have been edited in FCP to AE, keeping the quality, speed, etc.? Help me show my boss (who's an old fogy by the way) that I can edit, and the slight quality hits that my editing work is taking is due to my incompetence with file transfers, rather than the problem being "it's a mac, that's why". Thanks a lot!
 
Hey wing the animation codec is ur bet, its pretty much lossless. Or when you render out use NONE for compression.
 
If you're working in DV, then you want to stay in DV, right? But if you want lossless compression I have found QuickTime using PNG (24-bit) compression is best. Lossless and smaller size than TIF or Animation codec. The only problem is it won't play back smoothly in realtime in a viewer, but it's a good storage/transfer encoding.
 
HiRez said:
If you're working in DV, then you want to stay in DV, right? But if you want lossless compression I have found QuickTime using PNG (24-bit) compression is best. Lossless and smaller size than TIF or Animation codec. The only problem is it won't play back smoothly in realtime in a viewer, but it's a good storage/transfer encoding.
Click to expand...

Don't export out to dv as this will introduce another level of compression to your files. Keep it lossless until final output.
 
What about exporting Quicktime and unchecking the "Make Self-Contained" option? This references the source videos during playback (if no filters were applied) rather than re-rendering them and losing more quality to compression.

This would be a great option if you were keeping it inside Final Cut, but I don't know how well it works cross platform and in After Effects and all that.
 
faustfire said:
Don't export out to dv as this will introduce another level of compression to your files. Keep it lossless until final output.
Click to expand...

If his files are already in DV, then they should not be recompressed when exporting to DV, should they? Of course if there's effects and compositing...
 
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