I recently purchased the premium adobe production suite and have come upon some trouble while importing footage into after effects. In the case of every single footage file I import, the image quality becomes slightly degraded. It doesn't seem to matter what codecs are used in the imported footage, since it is a consistent problem that happens with all of them. It's not a blindingly obvious issue, but it's obvious enough to get me a little worried. My theory is that there are some specific import settings that are set to automatically lower the quality. I've yet to find these mysterious settings.

If there might be some other reason you could think of, any help would be appreciated.

Do mean import from another program, or when you capture directly from camera into AE 7.0?

Any chance you could zip a small clip and AE project and post it somewhere for review?

The most common causes for image quality loss are
- Incorrect field order settings
- Incorrect frame rate
- Differences in pixel resolution and/or aspect ratio

These usually turn up when looking at a comp containing the clip in a layer that has different settings for these values than the source clip. One way to avoid this when creating a new comp is to use the browser window to drag the clip to the "New Comp" control at the bottom of the browser. This automatically creates a new comp that has exactly the same resolution, frame rate, field order, and length as the source clip.

If you've imported a video file into your project, you should be able to double-click the clip in the browser to see the appearance of the original file. A clip displayed in the viewer this way should have exactly the same quality as the same clip viewed in premiere.

Ah yes. Problem solved.

It was, after all, the field order settings. I wasn't setting up new compositions by dragging the files into the new comp box, so that probably explains why the settings were messed up. Works fine now. Thank you so very much.