Best codec to Render HD/SD

[Steve Roberts]

Use Animation, 8-bit uncompressed, or 10-bit uncompressed. Those are lossless.

Anything else recompresses the footage in a lossy manner, as you’ve seen.

[Kevin Camp]

the yuv to rgb conversion is the gotcha here. it seems to be impossible to go from yuv to rgb and back to yuv and have it look exactly the same.

what seems to be your best bet is to try and export your footage from your nle with a conversion from yuv to rgb to a lossless or uncompressed format. take that into ae, render back to the same format. import that into your nle converting the rgb to yuv and see how close you are. (unfortuanately, the nle will recompress the lossless/uncompresseed footage back to the compression used to capture the original, so some quality loss will occur).

you can also compare that to using ae to do the yuv conversion. take your yuv footage, choose interpret footage from the file menu, click the check box for expand itu-r 601 luma values. drop that into a comp, then add a levels adjustment with black output set to 16 and white output set to 235. render and import into you nle (no conversion for color space) and compare.

choose which looks best to you, and use that workflow, but i think you’ll always get some shift and slight quality loss.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Pieco]

Thank you. For Graphics, the animation codec is what I use. But it still does something to the footage when I export.

[Pieco]

thanks for your explanation. I will have to try the process that you describe. I never thought about the yuv to rgb conversion. thanks for your time, i appreciate it.