sloppy compression on my gradient titles

[sunchaser]

hey guys,

i am using cce sp 2.67.

my picture looks fine but i'm having a serious problem with my title sequence. I animated the sequence in after effects: a light illuminates text and casts a shadow. the light fades on an then off. when compressed in CCE the gradient from the light part of the screne to the dark part of the screen is very pixilated. instead of being a smooth gradient, the illumination is made up of thick rings of different colors. it looks even worse when they move.

i've tried several tests to get a good mpeg 2 of my title sequence. i've tried the animation and grafic quality filters. i've tried cbr and vbr with 9'800 k minimum bits. i've tried manipulating the bit allocation in a vbr as the guide instructed.

i'm stuck and i need some help. can mpeg2 produce a smooth gradient from one color to another? or is this unachievable.

[RB]

Increase "Quantizer characteristics" in Quality settings. Try values from 30 - 40.

[sunchaser]

hey,
i tried setting the quantization settings to 64 and it looked marginally better, but on the second pass of my vbr it looks horrible.

i'm wondering if its possible to export the title sequence as a series of jpgs or something and then make them a movie in scenarist?

thanks,
max

[RB]

The JPEGs will still need to be converted to MPEG2, so this won't help. Sorry, not sure what else to try.

[Trahald]

are you saying that at 9800 kbps cbr it still pixilates? or do you mean only after a vbr pass? and if so how long is the sequence (in minutes) and what final size are you getting (ie what is the final average bitrate). does it look bad at 9800 cbr? just wondering

[sunchaser]

i was doing a little test with a few video clips, a static title and this moving title sequence. maybe 20 seconds long. the title sequence itself is only about 10 or less.

i did try encoding with min and max kbs at 9,800. i didn't record and don't remember the file size, but yes - the gradient in the title sequence still looked horrible, made of distinct rings of color that didn't blend together, and pixelated pretty bad.

[sunchaser]

BREAKING NEWS
BREAKING NEWS


someone suggested that adobe gradients don't encode well. so, i tried making a similar gradient in combustion and found that it encoded to mpg2 very nicely.

then i realized something - i never tried encoding the original movie of my title that i exported from AE. when i encoded that to mpg2, it looked just as nice as the combustion one.

just to make sure, i re-encoded (with the same settings) my test footage that i exported from avid and the title looked horrible.

SO, my original AE footage encodes fine. but, when imported and exported from avid, it encodes horribly.

any explinations or fixes for that?

thanks,
max