Vegas pans vs After Effects pans?

Zendorf wrote on 7/2/2003, 1:19 AM
I like to do as much as I can in Vegas as the next person, but there are times when I need to use After Effects. In my current project I have a shot where I have digital photo (1600x1200) of a wall that I shot and in AE I have mapped/pinned a couple of videos to this wall. This was done in a one comp(size 1600x1200) and then I have brought this comp into another comp(720x576) so that I can pan/zoom around the wall with the videos stuck to the wall so to speak.

This works fine except for some reason it looks really jerky and grainy (like bad antialiasing as the pan goes across the wall. When I try a similar pan in Vegas4 of the photo it looks smooth as butter, so I would like to do it in Vegas, but due to not being able to use comps in Vegas (as far as I know) I am stumped. Aside from maybe doing a render in AE (at 1600x1200) and then pannning/zooming this huge file in Vegas? Which I think I can do if I update to Vegas 4c (currently using 4a).

Can anyone with experience in both programs tell me why the pans are so much smoother in Vegas, and if I can do it all in Vegas? Man, I really wish there was a corner pin plugin for Vegas tho...yeah I know I could use 3dle, but that is just not accurate enough for perpective pinnings.

Cheers for any help!

Comments

David_Kuznicki wrote on 7/2/2003, 6:50 AM
--Can anyone with experience in both programs tell me why the pans are so much smoother in Vegas, and if I can do it all in Vegas? Man, I really wish there was a corner pin plugin for Vegas tho...yeah I know I could use 3dle, but that is just not accurate enough for perpective pinnings.

I hate to ask the obvious question, but did you check your quality settings when you rendered from AE? I work with both all the time & don't have a complaint with either when it comes to panning/zooming...

David.
mikkie wrote on 7/2/2003, 2:57 PM
Don't see that doing this in vegas would be impossible, but *might* take a good hit re: render times. Might pre-render the wall in ae & do the pan with supersampling in vegas.
Jason_Abbott wrote on 7/2/2003, 4:24 PM
Someone somewhere (Chienworks or forum post?) posted an example of what sounds like exactly this. As I recall, the steps were to set the properties in Vegas to the high resolution you need (up to 2048x2048 I think) and then stick your multiple videos, titles, etc. into that large frame with normal track motion and then render that down. Then load the resultant video into a project of normal dimensions and pan, skew as desired.
Zendorf wrote on 7/2/2003, 10:20 PM
Thanks for the replies guys....yeah I think I will try it all in Vegas as Jason states. I knew it was possible , just that i didn't want to render out such a huge sized video(1600x1200) and I don't think that was even possible to do that size in 4a, but I have just downloaded 4c and will give it a try. Of course the advantage of doing something like this in AE is that you can use comps and don't have to render out a huge vid to pan over.
I definitely had the the best settings on in AE David, but to my utter amazement Vegas is so much smoother for photo pans than AE..for this particular photo anyway, which is a very noisy looking wall. Maybe Vegas has better subpixel interpolation than AE, but the AE pan (especially as it is a very slow pan) was just screaming of aliasing artifacts....just like doing a 3d render with lots of textures and no Antialiasing on!
shogo wrote on 7/2/2003, 11:43 PM
I had the same problem, you have to disable resample on that track. I had the problem with a very large photoshop pic I had (3000 x3000) when I would zoom in and pan it looked horrible until I disabled resample completley. Right click your track then mouse over to switches and disable resample. It may still look wrong on a preview but when you output the final video it works great.
mikkie wrote on 7/3/2003, 9:42 AM
what bothers me about doing some of this stuff in vegas, is there doesn't seem a way to tell the prog that I want to keep this video clip at this size - say you want to import a clip at 320 x 240 for placement in a full sized frame... Vegas will want to display that clip at proj frame size, and you then reduce the frame size back to what you wanted. I worry that vegas resamples up to frame size, then back down, which takes time and reduces quality - don't know if the prog is smart enough to say that's where I was to start with, so don't do anything but place the clip. Or it may be that to me the preview window is just misleading, that it isn't reflecting what's going on, that it's just simulating what a render to proj settings would look like.

Large still handling also seems counterintuitive me... the preview shows the entire pic, cropping it shows the selected part of the image, which doesn't fit the frame until the stretch option is checked. If I crop to a 720 x 480 pixel frame for panning, I would want that portion of the picture sampled certainly, but not re-sampled to another size. I'm not sure how Vegas handles this internally.

Visually I know doesn't seem to take a hit, but noise doesn't have to be visually noticable before it starts to effect compressed wmv or mpg2 encoded file size. And yeah, I'm probably too much of a stickler on not resampling.