After Effects vs FCP

Justin

Justin

Active member
Hey guys, any help on this would be awesome.

I'm in the middle of editing an indy feature and were about to get into color correcting.
My friend has told me that his After Effects teacher has told him to never do anything in Final Cut Pro that requires the video to be rendered. But only to do it in After Effects because Final Cut creates very compressed render files compromising the quality and After Affects does not compress its' render files creating a better image.

Is this true???

Thanks a lot,
Justin
 
well in AE you can do that too, it depends only on you; I mean to set bad render options
 
This is not true. If your shooting DV footage it doesn't matter what software program you use it still is going to recompress the footage to render it. After Effects included. If you take your clips into After Effects and apply a bunch of color correcting and filters and other stuff. When it's time to go back to your NLE you have to export a QuickTime movie in AE to DV. This is going to apply the NTSC DV compressor to the footage. Since the footage was origionally compressed using DV in camera then captured it already had the compression done once. Now AE is going to recompress it using the same DV compressor therefore compressing it again. No getting around it.
However, Some people do stuff to the footage in AE then export to another program to do more. In this case they'll use the "Animation" compressor which is a no loss compression. Take that into another app, do whatever to it, export to "Animation" compressor again with no loss again. In effect doing many different operations without losing any quality at all. Of course the "Animation" compressor creates huge files (No compression). Lets say a clip is 300MB in DV. Export in "Animation" and the clip is now more like 1 GB,... HUGE!
But guess what. Now you have to get it back into FCP to play on a NTSCDV Timeline so you'll have to recompress using the NTSCDV compressor eventually.
This route is great if you need to do things to your footage in many diff. apps but only render it back to DV once.
 
Holy crap!
That was unbelievably and amazingly informative.
I will definilty be using this information in the very near future.
Thanks so much MarcM for answering my question better than I ever expected.
Meka Thanks Again,
Justin
 
Justin said:
Holy crap!
That was unbelievably and amazingly informative.
Click to expand...

...except for the fact he left out that you could just work in an uncompressed comp in FCP. Lossless in AE & FCP, it's a beautiful thing.
 
AE - output module. Animation highest quality or no compression.
FCP - Rendering format same as above.\
Sequence settings - video processing can be higher and codec can be lossless as well.
 
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