Compression for After Effects

S

Sinamatic

Member
Hello, I don't use FCP so I wasn't sure what to tell my friend.. He is bringing me footage tomorrow, and he was unsure what settings to use he uses FCP on a mac and I'm going to be using the footage in After Effects for PC. Also the footage is HD aswell. What settings should he use?
 
If your friend is editing the footage on a sequence with the same settings (720p24) as the footage, then he just needs to export using the default settings. FCP will spit out a full res QT movie. I suppose he could use one of the "uncompressed" codecs if he really wanted to. I don't know if it would make much difference in this case.

What's important is that you know what his frame size and aspect are, so you can make your comp match the movie. You'll know you did it right if you drop it in and they line up. If they don't, you need to adjust your comp settings.
Also be sure to find out what frame rate he is using.

Hope that helped.
 
My friend said that he thinks FCP's DVCPRO HD Codec is unique to FCP -- so anything he exports as a self-contained Quicktime file using that compression will only work on a Mac with FCP installed.
 
Your friend is right about the problems with the DVCPro HD codec. It is not an open source codec and the last I heard not accessible on a PC natively. I think the only PC option is to get Adobe's DV Rack or whatever its called. I believe it has Serious Magic's DVCPro HD Decoder in it. Not a really friendly way to go about it all though.

Probably the easiest way is to have your friend export the footage using an uncompressed format. It will bloat the file size, but it won't degrade the quality. Then you can work on it and send it back to him the same.

cheers.
 
Yup- I'd go uncompressed or just to an image sequence as just about any computer in the world can work with an image sequence of TIFs or TGAs and it adds no additional compression.

Noah
 
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