I am using After Effects on a Windows 2000 Professional machine, and when I import Quicktime footage into After Effects it is blocky and low res... looking exactly like someone ran it through a de-interlacing filter. It also exports like this and looks horrible. My Composition settings are set for 720x480 at 29.97 fps. I noticed somehwere that there is a setting for preview resolution or something like that (can't remember off of the top of my head), and it is set to "full" (720x480). You can see the blockiness in the preview window.

How do I get After Effects to work and output in real DV resolution and not have it look like it was run through a very bad deinterlacing program? I must have SOMETHING set wrong. :)

There is a best settings in Render settings. Press on Current settings in the render window and up pops the submenu to where you can select best settings:

Quality: best
Resolution: full
Effects: All on

Output module:
Leave video for windows
Format options select: DV

hope that helps

If you leave everything on current settings it will take whatever the setting where while you were working in the comp.

Rob:D

I do know that when playing back DV QuickTime on PC the default
quality settings are not HIQH-QUALITY. I don't know how
this translates into AE since I haven't loaded any DV QT material
in that yet. Perhaps you need to tell AE/QuickTime to treat it as
high-quality? The trick from Robert might do this.

Do you know that the QT file is full resolution to start with? AE cannot scale up footage without causing artifacts.

Robert is correct about how to insure you get the Rendering you desire. I'd go further and suggest that you set up the Render module sub-menus and make them the default values.

Robert's tips helped, thanks. The DV codec when using Quicktimes on a PC is a bit weird. The data is exactly the same, and that is what is worked with in Premiere. But when playing back the Quicktime file itself on the desktop, it looks horrible. It just decompresses poorly. No big deal as it is not my intention to show my footage as a Quicktime DV. My intention is to show it on TV which looks much better. So long as the program does not use the crappy playback as source then I am OK with the file looking a bit bad. Did that make any sense at all? :)