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Lag after rendering the videos in After Effects, Premiere Pro and Vegas…HELP!

Help! Someone please!

Either my editing/filmmaking is done until I get a new computer or someone please tell me I’m doing something wrong.

Yesterday I made a quick intro in After Effects CS5. A 5 second clip involving built in Particle World and 3D camera flying thru the text. Very basic and simple.
After rendering into basically every format and trying out to see what works, I had two outcomes: distorted quality or good quality but lags.

Lag is about half a second or so but that is enough for me to say the footage is unacceptable. It would play for a second perfectly fine and than lag for half a second…..then play normally for two seconds and lag again….

Now I googled the problem and they say either my computer renders it that way because of not enough ram or something or during playback, my computer cant play the video perfectly or something like that. They said that for preview I can render half quality, BUT MY ULTIMATE GOAL is to save the video and perhaps save it to DVD or computer and be able to play it on the TV for my friends and so on with good quality or watch is full screen on my computer and enjoy the quality.

IMO the best way to go about my post work would be using After Effects then transfer the footage I edited into Premiere Pro and render final video to a format. BUT> which format is the BEST to render in so I can use it to submit to a film festival (I know, high hopes) and play at home while retaining the best quality possible and be able to view full screen. I think I will be using DSLR preset in Premiere Pro CS5 which is DSLR 720p > 1280x720 since i’ll be using one to shoot my films.

With that said, I tried various formats. Lossless, compressed AVI, MPEG4….and so on. Perhaps its my player? I used Windows Media.

One more thing I will try is to take the final clip and play it on my friends faster comp and see if its my comp having problems playing or renders it wrong.

If you watch youtube short films shot on dslrs you will notice that some of them have the lag I am reffering to….

Also, don’t know how much it matters, but I was using custom setting in AFTER EFFECTS which was set to hdv 1280x720.

So to recap:

Which format, aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3?) and settings is the best to render in Premiere Pro CS5 > to watch at home full screen or on TV and so on with the best quality?

Why is my rendered footage lags? Is it due to slow computer or I do something wrong during render?

My comp is windows 7 64 bit 4gb ram.

Thank you all

Roman
 
i have this same problem... i basically have to give into the fact that rendering gets bottle necked and the animation cant process on my comp...

first off... the ram isnt the only issue... you need to think about your processer and your video card... and if they share the load...

you can basically watch it all happen using a computer monitoring software and see if the lag happens at the same time that your ram and your cpu are peaked out... plus try and turn off different things that speed up the rendering process... allow the comp to do its things and let it take as long as it takes...

some programs like cyber link power director atomatically turns on a feature that speeds up the rendering... and it just doesnt help... it gets hung up...

can you try posting the video so we can view it and see if its at a transition point ... i need an example of is happening... ie a direct link to this exact thing... not just saying that it happens in other videos...

but for the most part... i would guess its a settings issue... or the comp cant handle it...
 
Are you saying it doesn't play back smoothly?

Most systems can't play uncompressed HD back in realtime, you need a crazy fast harddrive just to read that much data per second. This doesn't mean the video is bad though. If you use encore and create a DVD or export it through Adobe Media encoder into a compressed codec you should be fine.

As far as render presets in AME, if you're entering festivals you're probably using without-a-box. Try rendering in the Vimeo HD preset and bumping the audio quality up to 320 and the frame rate down to original. Best filesize/quality bang for buck in my opinion.

If after effects is crashing during export... How's your harddrive space, do you have enough? Do you meet adobe's minimum system requirements? Also, not accusing or anything, but pirate copies of video software tend to be full of bugs and glitches... could be an explanation for AE crashing.
 
Are you saying it doesn't play back smoothly?

Most systems can't play uncompressed HD back in realtime, you need a crazy fast harddrive just to read that much data per second. This doesn't mean the video is bad though. If you use encore and create a DVD or export it through Adobe Media encoder into a compressed codec you should be fine.

As far as render presets in AME, if you're entering festivals you're probably using without-a-box. Try rendering in the Vimeo HD preset and bumping the audio quality up to 320 and the frame rate down to original. Best filesize/quality bang for buck in my opinion.

If after effects is crashing during export... How's your harddrive space, do you have enough? Do you meet adobe's minimum system requirements? Also, not accusing or anything, but pirate copies of video software tend to be full of bugs and glitches... could be an explanation for AE crashing.

and this is why i am cheap and went with cyberlink hahahahha i couldnt get shit to run smoothly on the hacked version of adobe i was using hahahahah so i bought cyberlink hahahahaha

lots of good info in pauls post... let us know how things work out...
 
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Thanks for the input guys.
I will post a video tonight to show what im talking about. After Effects nor Premiere Pro crash. They never did, perhaps u misunderstood my post. Its just the rendering issue and play smoothness during playback.

i have 250 GB left of free space out of 500. I will be upgrading my RAM from 4gb to 8gb hopefully in the next few weeks and getting external 1TB hard drive for use with neoscene as it will create huge files.

Here is my question....

What is the overall best format to render/export my FINAL project? After all my post video/audio has been done, which format and tamplate do I use in Premiere Pro CS5
 
Youll find that the file you post to yahoo will play back just fine (Im betting anyway) Youtube will encode your file for playback.

My computer will not play back 1080p NON COMPRESSED files in any decent way. I use handbrake to get a nice .h264 file for casual viewing and uploads. For my home theater I render to cineform avi, but thats a whole nother kettle of fish.
 
OK guys, so here is the lowdown.....

I watched the windows media player closely and saw that the timebar line thingy, lags and freezes of half of a second at the same time the video freezes....that means that the render went fine, however, my computer is strugling with playback? It also happens during the keyframes when 3d takes place....

HOWEVER, if that was true...the playback on vimeo wouldnt include the lag but should rather play fine. it does not however.

here is an example i did i was talking about..

ps please dont pay attention to the Sketchy-ass BEE. I was getting creative lol....notice the lag?

http://vimeo.com/20692141
 
OK guys, so here is the lowdown.....

I watched the windows media player closely and saw that the timebar line thingy, lags and freezes of half of a second at the same time the video freezes....that means that the render went fine, however, my computer is strugling with playback? It also happens during the keyframes when 3d takes place....

HOWEVER, if that was true...the playback on vimeo wouldnt include the lag but should rather play fine. it does not however.

here is an example i did i was talking about..

ps please dont pay attention to the Sketchy-ass BEE. I was getting creative lol....notice the lag?

http://vimeo.com/20692141

No, I did not notice any lag. It looks pretty good to me. I think you only have a playback issue.

Sorry, I'm coming late to this party. I actually had a similar issue with footage that I rendered from CS5. It was laggy and jumpy, just as you are describing. Nevertheless, I imported it into my Premiere project, and it was just fine. Inside Premiere, there was no lag or jumpiness. And when I exported from Premiere, all is hunky-dory. I don't know why my computer doesn't like files exported from After Effects, but that's how it is, and when I put them into my regular editing program, they work just fine. Hopefully, you'll have the same results.

Again, though -- that vimeo link looks just fine to me (although, I don't know what it's supposed to look like, so...).
 
The lag problem is simple, just upload to YouTube and you shouldn't have any lag problems. My computer is old and is Windows 7 32bit with 3GB of RAM and when I watch in Windows Media Player, QuickTime, etc. it lags. But when I upload to YouTube and watch it, it plays smoothly. So try that, then tell me if it works.
 
Hmmm fellas, please rewatch the video on vimeo and look at the text the whole time, towards the end where the camera starts moving towards the text and text starts to disappear, do you notice the lag?

I thought that when uploaded to vimeo, vimeo will render and compress and be able to play smoothly.

hmmm

perhaps burn on dvd and try to play on my tv?

which format is best to burn on dvd to watch on my tv?

Thanks,
Roman
 
Hmmm fellas, please rewatch the video on vimeo and look at the text the whole time, towards the end where the camera starts moving towards the text and text starts to disappear, do you notice the lag?

I thought that when uploaded to vimeo, vimeo will render and compress and be able to play smoothly.

hmmm

perhaps burn on dvd and try to play on my tv?

which format is best to burn on dvd to watch on my tv?

Thanks,
Roman

Well, as I said before, we couldn't possibly know what you intended it to look like.

Okay, yeah, now that you mention specifics, I can see how the text is not moving smoothly. It moves in jumps.
 
OK, so the FIRST time I played it after it loaded, I saw a LITTLE lag in the text slide near the end.. on subsequent plays pretty smooth. You wont get much smoother at 24p. Turn on motion blur for the text layer to smooth the frame blend even more. Thats my $0.02 anyway..
 
Now that the OP has pointed out what we're looking for, I definitely see it there. If you watch the text, it doesn't move in a continuous motion; rather, it speeds up, slows down, speeds up, slows down. If that's not how it's supposed to look, then it's definitely a problem.
 
Its a poor test.

Render a longer clip with the text motion occurring sooner in the clip. In my experience, short clips sometimes cause more problems then long ones. Or rather, near the beginning and ending of clips the codex is doing something different than during the middle, establishing cadence, syncing, caching etc.
 
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