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  1. Member
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    My situation. I've got a huge project fixing to be finished up in After Effects. It is 1920x1080 and over two hours long. After mulling over the currently available playback options, I eventually accepted the fact that there is no way to play the video for people at its native 1080p60, because no hardware maker - not even those who build dedicated media servers - has elected to support anything better than "level 4.1." Fine. That made the PS3 an easy choice for playback, as it turns out that I can create an MPEG4-AVC encode of the video, store it on the PS3's HDD and play it from there. This was all decided a couple weeks ago.

    What I have only just recently discovered is that, inexplicably, After Effects does not have any frameserving capabilities. I'll avoid soapboxing on just how ridiculous that is, and skip to how it affects me. What that leaves me with is two choices:

    1: Render the entire video as RAW 1080i60 video, and then encode the raw video. This would produce a file somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 TB large. There are many layers of reasons why this is an impossible option.

    2: Figure out just what MPEG4-AVC settings / specs / whatever that the PS3 is happy with, and pray that After Effects itself is capable of encoding the video within those specs.

    Said specs are an unknown. But they are evidently very, very limited. So limited, in fact, that there are really only two applications out there that are widely known as being capable of generating a PS3-happy MPEG4-AVC (they have templates which force compliance), and neither of those are After Effects. (They are MeGUI and XviD4PSP.)

    That's pretty much where I'm at. Generate a 1.5TB file, or figure out how I can get AE to make a compliant MP4. A fantasyland 3rd option would be to make AE's devs feel so ashamed about failing to support such an utterly ubiquitous function as frameserving, that they promptly develop and release an update which enables it.
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  2. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    You talk about frameserving being ubiquitous, but in reality very few applications natively support it. it never ceases to amaze me how often people get angry at applications for not supporting what they want to at the end of a project, instead of perhaps thinking all these things through at the start of the project.

    There are other alternatives to the martyrdom of rendering terrabytes of uncompressed video. HDV (HD Mpeg-2) and then converting with Xvid4PSPS is one way to go.

    Searching the Adobe forums is another. There does appear to be issues with output AVC from CS3 apps, although it is also a problem that is easily fixed : http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?14@@.3c0573ce/3 gives some details, but posting in the Adobe forums will probably elicit more comment and answers.
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  3. Member
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    Originally Posted by guns1inger
    You talk about frameserving being ubiquitous, but in reality very few applications natively support it. it never ceases to amaze me how often people get angry at applications for not supporting what they want to at the end of a project, instead of perhaps thinking all these things through at the start of the project.
    I could admit that it was presumptuous of me to take it for granted that I wouldn't stumble over a limitation with AE, but I'll pass. The fact is that every single program I have ever used which deals with video on any kind of editing level - with one exception - has some kind of frameserving capacity. Compound that fact with AE's industry leading status, and the evidently continuing inability, as of CS3, of the program to enable in kind is, to say the least, conspicuous.

    I did ask around on other forums before seeking some hints from the rather more well-informed folks who hang out here. That's pretty much how I was able to determine that my poor luck with Google was not a fluke.

    I'll try out rendering and remuxing when next able. Thanks for pointing out the thread.
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  4. Member FulciLives's Avatar
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    I went over this already but here we go again. Level 4.1 supports 720p (1280x720) at 60fps but 1080p (1920x1088) can only be 30fps.

    This is from wikipedia when you do a search for h264.

    How big would an uncompressed 720p 60fps file be? I have no idea but I'm sure less than 1080p or 1080i at 60fps.

    My thought is you are probably better off with 720p at 60fps than 1080i/p at 30fps. Fluidity of motion is more important than resolution.

    - John "FulciLives" Coleman
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    Here's an issue I've just encountered. Feels like a faq. Probably the answer is readily available and I'm just missing it.

    Megui seems to want 1920x1088. Unfortunately, this is not the resolution of my videos. Not from the HV20 camcorder, and not what I specified for my own video projects. It's also not what the PS3 outputs. Yet there it is. So.. what do I do? I can obviously go back to my project in AE, pad the video from 1920x1080 to 1920x1088, and give it to Megui, but what will the result be? Will the PS3 scale the 1920x1088 down to 1920x1080 before outputting? Or do those extra 8 lines get truncated by default? Or does it, perhaps, sometimes do it one way and sometimes the other?

    Blargh.
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  6. Member Ethlred's Avatar
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    I read on Doom9 that with 1080 input to x264 it winds up as 1088 anyway with the extra masked off.

    I found that rather short thread I somehow stumbled across a few weeks ago.

    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=111972

    Its two years old but seems to be correct still. Which makes wonder why all the emphasis on divide by 16. I suppose its for other encoders such as Xvid.
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