exporting from Liquid to After effects and back
 

Trying to export edited HDV-SD 25p footage to After Effects for keying, effects and CC. There is no way of exporting QT-Reference from Liquid, so how do I keep the best quality from Liquid into After Effects, and also back to Liquid for recording on tape? Settings, codec etc.

PS: any way to record to tape in After Effects?

Tried uncompressed AVI? Both out of Liquid and AE.

Hi Magnus

I'm not really seeing better quality with uncompressed .avi, my concern is that I'm losing a quality generation for every time I export (which will be 2x before dumping back to tape)

As far as I can remember you shouldn't experience any loss og quality when using either Fuse or uncompressed AVI.

Isn't it MPEG2, hdv, where you could be losing a quality generation for every export?

I have no experience with AE... Liquid is M2V by default. Try using Fuse for the sequence between mark in and mark out. You might get better results. When you fuse, do not import back in as part of fuse (you will have to imported the AE output of course.)

George:

When I Fuse the uncompressed timeline, the file format becomes .2yuv and not .m2v. After Effects does not support .2vuy files. How do I get an uncompressed timeline from Avid Liquid into After Effects?

Try creating a new sequence that is MPEG. Drop the current sequence from the sequence view in the racks into the timeline. You can then dismantle that container. The new sequence will output as MPEG (and preserve the YUV). Fuse adopts the properties of the sequence and your current one is YUV.

I will try that. Just wondering though, will there will be noticable difference between Fusing (MPEG) and exporting to Uncompressed QT Movie? Wouldn't the QT be better for keying and compositing?

After Effects does support importing 2vuy files. When you selct them you have to tell After Effects to load them in as quicktime files. It defaults to some other format that will not work with 2vuy files.

With After Effects you can also export 2vuy files as well by going to file - export and not the render que. You have to export as Avid 2vuy format. This export is a little buggy however and only works with certain basic formats so it may not work for you.



The other option is to set your timeline sequence as RGB. When you fuse this timeline it will fuse as a "none" compressed RGB AVI file which will load into After Effects with no problem at all. You can then render a "None" compressed AVI file from After Effects to load back into Liquid. RGB AVI files do work in Liquid as a realtime format but they need alot of drive speed. For example a normal 29.97 NTSC clip would need around 30 MB/S of bandwidth for a single stream.

Do not worry about loosing a generation of quality. When you render in After Effects you would loose a genration anyways. By converting to a RGB AVI you keep a high standard throughout the effect process. Once it is a RGB AVI it may not look any better then the HDV file but it will not get any worse either. It is the same concept behind codecs such as Cineform. You loose a genration when going to the Cineform codec but every edit and render at the point stays at the same level of quality.

I learned the hard way from days of wasted time that Liquid is not the program to use when dealing with uncompressed if you ever have to take the video out of Liquid.

Avid won't publish the facts and diehard Liquid users skirt around the issues claiming Liquid is great, without details.

There are workarounds that may or may not work, but inevitably at a loss in quality.

Internally Liquid employs a proprietary, legacy scheme for dealing with uncompressed.

BlackMagic codecs, Edius and prayers sometimes can be part of a strategy to work with Liquid Uncompressed and external programs.

How about Xsend to AfterEffects using RGB-AVI? It's always worked OK. Also, have you considered using Boris Red or BorisFX? They plug right in and use most AE plugins which allows you to render the files directly in Liquid without an extra generation loss if your change the file parameters.

whenever working with "pre-renders" or going from one software to the other I would recommend using QT ANIMATION Millions of colors.

its free, almost any software can read it and can even save alpha channels if you switch to "Millions +

Good luck