After Effects rendering bitmap problem

[edwinbradford]

Hi, can someone tell me where I'm going wrong? I'm new to video editing and have been working on a project for a job interview collating video footage which I have been editing in After Effects to make a sample movie.

My workflow (just for background info) has been to record video games footage via my standalone DVD Recorder, convert it to Quicktime footage using Cinematize (Mac), import it into After Effects, edit it and render the movie to a 640 x 480 NTSC mov file.

Generally I've been able to get things working fine. I convert the source M2v material using the DVCPRO codec and everything looks OK until I come to use the imported bitmap. It was created in Illustrator and is a centred white logo on a flat black background, exported as a tif and imported into After Effects where it looks great. When I render my movie using the DVCPRO codec the imported video renders fine but the imported bitmap degrades horribly. Alternatively, if I render the movie using the Animaion codec the bitmap is fine but the general quality/compression ratio is poor. Do I have to soften the logo first in Photoshop or apply some filter to get it to render properly?

Can someone advise me? Many thanks.

[guns1inger]

I have noticed that often text and overlays look horrible as DV-avi when played back on the PC, especially using WMP, however when encoded and authored look sharp and as intended. I would do a test encode/author onto a DVD-RW and see how it comes up.

[edwinbradford]

Thanks for the reply and advice. I solved it this morning just after posting. I reimported the image into Photoshop and applied 0.5% blurring, reimported into After Effects, exported with DVCNTSC codec and it was perfect. Clearly, although my original graphic file was anti aliased it needed a little more softening before being suitable.