AE to FCP with no loss of quality

[Bill_Hooper]

In the past I've had problems going from FCP to AE and back to FCP. It works, but there is some quality loss. The footage brought into FCP had more noise to it.

I'm about to go through the same process - export from FCP, go into AE, then back to FCP for final output. Will there always been some quality loss?

Also what is the best way to export from FCP and import into AE? What is the best way to export from AE and import into FCP?

Thanks for any help!
Bill

[kai]

Export your movie using animation codec. It's lossless. (or go uncompressed)

[CaptainMench]

If you aren't worried about alpha channels, I've found that exporting as DV-NTSC works just fine. I haven't seen/noticed ANY loss.

Plus, zero rendering.

CaptM

[Matt Grunau]

In the past I've had problems going from FCP to AE and back to FCP. It works, but there is some quality loss. The footage brought into FCP had more noise to it.

I'm about to go through the same process - export from FCP, go into AE, then back to FCP for final output. Will there always been some quality loss?

Also what is the best way to export from FCP and import into AE? What is the best way to export from AE and import into FCP?

Thanks for any help!
Bill


Render it uncompressed, but it will take a HUGE amount of HD unless you are working with short clips.

[Jive]

FCP -> AE: if your source is DV-25, you can use any DV codec to export with no quality loss. Rendering will also be faster than any other codec because there is no recompression of native DV footage (if you've added fx,transitions, etc. to it, those sections will need to render).

Better yet, export as a reference file (quicktime) and you don't even have to use up more disk space to create a new file with the same footage you already have. Reference files are basically signpost files that appear to be valid quicktime files to other programs, but are in fact merely references to the source media. If you're only exporting video (i.e. no audio), rendering to a reference file will be nearly instantaneous. Rendering with audio will take a bit longer as it has to write the entire waveform to file.

AE -> FCP: As you've most likely applied post-processing to your footage in AE, rendering using any sort of lossy compression will amount in loss in a loss in image quality. To avoid any possible generational loss, use a codec that is uncompressed or uses lossless compression. The main difference is that using lossless compression will create smaller filesizes, but will need to be decompressed before playback (meaning framerates may suffer). Uncompressed files are huge, but will most likely playback in FCP more smoothly than a compressed file.

Another common thing to do when rendering out of AE is to render to an image sequence. There are several advantages to this:

1) A unique image file is created for each frame, so if an error occurs 2 hours into the render, at least you won't have to restart from the beginning (tho you could also always just restart rendering at the frame where you left off and splice the two segments together afterwards).
2) Rendering to TIFF files offers more compatibility when moving footage among different systems, as quicktime files and AVI files are often platform (Mac/PC or even NLE) dependent.

[Matt Grunau]

Better yet, export as a reference file (quicktime) and you don't even have to use up more disk space to create a new file with the same footage you already have. Reference files are basically signpost files that appear to be valid quicktime files to other programs, but are in fact merely references to the source media. If you're only exporting video (i.e. no audio), rendering to a reference file will be nearly instantaneous. Rendering with audio will take a bit longer as it has to write the entire waveform to file.



This is the first I have ever heard of a Quicktime "reference" file. Could you elaborate as to the settings in quicktime to make one? The possibilities for these for what I do would be tremendous.

[TimeKoder13]

I believe JIVE is referring to a FCP movie ref file created by "File>export>Quicktime movie" in FCP 4-5, I believe it was actually called Final Cut Pro movie in FCP 3 and earlier. Yes they are great and you can bring them into all the other post apps from Combustion, RED, AE, Commotion etc. on to almost all the web file apps like Squeeze, Cleaner, etc. I think even Flash reads them.

[Scottdvx100]

A reference movie is like an alias with in and out points and points to your real movie file.
When you're in an application that provides a checkbox for Self-Contained movies when you export, you can turn that off and it can make a non-self contained movie.
You can also do this in QT Player. As mentioned the nice thing is this doesn't create another full size movie. The downside is you have to make sure not to delete or offload the original file. If so the ref movie won't do you any good. Likewise if you were to email or ftp the ref movie movie it wouldn't be of value to anyone.

If it's new movie (such as a rendered image) then there's no option to create a ref movie since there's no full movie to begin with.