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most efficient video formats to use for source files
What does everyone prefer to use as their video format for source files?
I am guessing that uncompressed is best – MOV Animation? or a targa sequence?
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5 Replies
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as far as bringing media into ae, the original source is probably prefered if ae will accept that format. you won’t get any any better quality converting a compressed file (say dv) to an uncompressed or lossless file, you’ll just eat up more disk space.
recently, i was working with some footage from a panasonic hvx200. it records to an mxf file system with dvcpro100 (hd) compression. ae will read the dvcpro100 codec, but it can’t decipher the mxf file structure. but fcp will, and, it will put the dvcpro100 codec in to a quicktime wrapper upon import, which ae can read. i didn’t even export the footage, i just pulled the files directly out of the capture folder where fcp places its footage. i’m not re-ecoding or converting the dvcpro100 footage, just stripping the mxf file stucture and placing it in a quicktime wrapper.
the only time i would look to export to a losseless or uncompressed codec is when ae won’t accept the native file format or codec. then, i use losseless animation (i’m mac based).
now, for rendering out of ae, generally i will always try to render to lossless animation… it’s losseless and supports alpha. also, if the peice is going to get edited on an nle that will compress the footage, i try to create pieces that can composited within the nle, over the compressed footage, rather than rendering in ae to a lossless codec which then gets recompressed in the nle at import (plus you can avoid the yuv-to-rgb-to-yuv color shift). sometimes you’ll have to compostie it all in ae, then it’s either lossless animation or the compression that is native to the nle (if the piece is lengthy, and the nle is going to convert it anyway, why not save some drive space).
i do the same thing for dvd, if the piece is short, i’ll render to lossless and let the dvd software handle the mpeg-2 encoding, if it’s long, i’ll render to mpeg-2 in ae.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Just wondering which is best for AE as it tends to need to read single frames rather than sequences – now I know most video compression isn’t going to take days to decompress as it has to do that on the fly – but I would think that something like an MP4 is a bad thing. Animation codec – surely AE has to read xx number of frames before the one it wants to use.
I’d imagine one that scrubs quickly in a player is best – and worst would be one that uses 25 (or however many) frames to make up an image like MPEG.
I was really wondering if there would be an advantage to uncompressed targa sequences. AE only has to decompress them and then store them uncompressed anyway.
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true, codecs that utilize temporal compression will be somewhat hard on ae. any image sequence should remove the chance of temporal compression. photoshop or pict both losslessly compress the image. i think the animation codec can be set not to use temporal compression (click format options and uncheck the key frame every xx frames).
you could render out a single animation to several different output modules and set a post-render action to import each render. then ram preview each to see which preview quicker, that should tell you how hard ae is working on each clip.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
QuickTime Photo JPEG works pretty well for playback in AE. Of course, at that point you might as well use an image sequence, especially since that would give you more choice as to the compression (or lack of compression).
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Well today I noticed that a few MP4 files were slowing things down massively – I had about 5 movie files in one comp and it was having a problem. I converted them to H264 (the movies are quite small so compression wasn’t a worry – we’re not talking full screen here) and the comp previewed much quicker.
The MP4 files were also making AE crash occasionally (via the delights of Quicktime) on my WinXP machine – having converted them to H264 there was no so much problem.
I wonder if a targa seq or suchlike is read in natively rather than through a codec – and might speed things up or else make things easier for AE? (more chance for it to decide to crash if it’s using Quicktime etc etc – not that it does all that often)
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