After Effects rendering out choppy footage...what could be wrong?

[James Carver]

i have a short quicktime movie i edited and put some effects in AE, it was shot at 24pn, but when i render it out it plays choppy....i'm on an intel mac using leopard, the .mov file is only 640x360, looks like the bit rate is at 8 on the composition and the resolution is set to auto

i notice it plays choppy on ram preview (which i assumed was supposed to do that anyway) and renders out exactly the same way.

my last mac was almost 2GHZ slower and spit out these files just fine.
quality and audio are perfect.

can someone help???

[Todd Kopriva]

Are your frame rate settings---both for the composition and in the render settings---set to your intended output frame rate?

Here are some links to sections of After Effects Help that might be relevant:

"Frame rate"

"Render settings"

[James Carver]

yes as far as i can see everything is set to output at 24fps same as the source

it previews choppy as well...

here's what it looks like after being output through AE http://www.dirtymartinithemovie.com/...tro_choppy.mov

[Todd Kopriva]

You can contact Adobe Technical Support for help with issues like this. You are entitled to a certain number of free calls for "installation issues, basic usage questions, and troubleshooting unexpected behavior for documented features".

For information on what free technical support you're entitled to, see this page:

Adobe - Support Plans : Getting Started Support

[James Carver]

yea i opened a case with online tech support and its been over 24 hours at this point with no response. last time we went back and forth for four days when my updates would not install after installation and i ended up finding the solution on my own after someone on a forum suggested a solution. adobe mentioned they had issues with the mac intel's that have 1TB of hard drive space.

i'm almost regretting getting after effects for mac at this point.

[Todd Kopriva]

Here's what I can tell you from a brief conversation that I just had with some other folks. I hope that some of it helps.

First, you should check the interpretation settings as recommended by Mylenium when you posted this question here:
Adobe Forums - AECS3 rendering out choppy footage

If you step through the footage, you can see that every frame occurs twice. This is definitely a problem from either the source footage or the interpretation of it, rather than a preview or render problem in After Effects. If you look at the gunshot effect, it has motion on every frame it's present on while the background video only updates every other frame.

I can guess some scenarios that might have caused this problem:

1. You have interpreted the footage at 12/15 fps but it's in a 24/30 fps composition.
2. You mucked around with the footage properties in QuickTime Pro.
3. You exported the footage from FCP or some other application that mucked with the QuickTime metadata.

Regarding the 1TB disk issue:
These issues were related to the updater not being able to find the applications to update correctly. It only occurred with the stock drives shipped by Apple, and then only with a particular brand of drive. (Samsung? Hitachi?)

[James Carver]

yea i checked the interpretation settings like Mylenium said (checked the quicktime properties) and it says its h.264 what else should i be checking?

ok now that you pointed it out i do notice that each frame plays twice and the after effects animation plays frame by frame as its supposed to. i also noticed the 2 mov files that did play correctly in AE does not have duplicate frames in the quicktime source file whereas the example i posted does.

i just checked my FCP file for the footage and it plays frame by frame, no duplicate frames...so this probably means that when exporting using compressor there is something not set right maybe?

You have interpreted the footage at 12/15 fps but it's in a 24/30 fps composition.

just for clarification what exactly do you mean when you say i have interpreted teh footage at 12/15? do u mean when i brought it into AE possibly one of the settings is set to 12/15 fps?

Regarding the 1TB disk issue: glad to hear that because the first thing i was thinking was it may have been the same issue again for whatever reason which would have been a drag. i am much happier now that it seems the issue is possibly with exporting out of compressor.

so basically i need to remove the duplicate frames in the footage and all should be fine?

[Todd Kopriva]

Originally Posted by James Carver

just for clarification what exactly do you mean when you say i have interpreted teh footage at 12/15? do u mean when i brought it into AE possibly one of the settings is set to 12/15 fps?

When you bring a file into After Effects, After Effects sees the video as a series of frames. After Effects needs to know how many of those frames are in each second of video. After Effects does a pretty good job of guessing this if your video has certain standard frame dimensions, etc., but you occasionally need to tell After Effects explicitly when it guesses wrong because there's something non-standard about your asset.

(See "Import footage items" for details.)

[James Carver]

alright, so now i'm back to square one. two other people with after effects have done the exact same steps as myself with the same original footage as i'm using and they have no choppy footage and no issues whatsoever....i've imported footage before in after effects when when i had my other mac i had bought back in 2006...now it seems to not be working with my newest machine.

has adobe been having this type of problem with any other machine?