Best way to export

[Steve Roberts]

It depends on how you compress it and what you want to do with the movie. There isn’t one “best way”.

In general, video needs to be compressed using a codec, which stands for CompressionDecompression. Basically. Some codecs compress more than others. More compression equals less quality. Animation is a codec, as is Sorenson, Photo-JPEG and ProRes 422.

Uncompressed video can play on an expensive multi-disk RAID array, but not many people have those.
Uncompressed or lossless (all high-quality) videos are used for transferring clips between applications. They are not to be played back on a hard drive.

Basically, you compress three ways:
1) for storage or transfer, using uncompressed or lossless
2) for playback on hard drive, DVD or web, using more lossy codecs such as Sorenson, MPEG-2 and so on.
3) for output to videotape through a video I/O card such as the decklink.

So.
What do you plan to do with the video? Play on a hard drive? Go to the web? Play on a TV? Send to a DVD Authoring program?

[Sam Rose]

Hi
Thanks for the reply.

This video will be used in Premier Pro to be at the start of other videos

[Steve Roberts]

I’m assuming you want to play out to DV tape at the end of it all.
Then you want the codec to match the settings of your Premiere timeline. If your timeline is DV, then your AE clip should be DV.

Why?

1. To take advantage of real-time editing in Premiere
2. Because you’re probably going to be exporting from Premiere using the timeline settings, which would be DV. If you were to import a higher-quality video into Premiere, it would have to be compressed to DV in Premiere anyway.

The problem is DV: it doesn’t like graphics. It was designed to handle footage.

If you want to go to tape at a higher quality, you need to play out to Betacam tape or DigiBeta tape from a system equipped . This is an expensive proposition, and not for the hobbyist unless he’s very well off.

So. If you want to go to DV tape, you have to use the DV codec, which doesn’t like graphics. Try to avoid saturated colours, and you might be in better shape.

Did that help?

[Sam Rose]

Hi
Yes it did, thanks very much.

[Shay Carriere]

Hey Steve, a question for you. I take alot of text animation out of AE and drop it into my DV timelines in FCP. Exporting from AE using the DV codec destroys my crisp text but using the animation codec gives my huge file sizes which is no good considering the number of animations I do.
What would be your suggestion for a codec sweet spot for use in my workflow?

BTW, after bringing into my DV FCP timeline, the videos are generally output for online streaming (further compressed with sorenson squueze) AS WELL as converted to mpeg2 for DVD. (Although quality of online video is paramount.)

thanks

Oh also, I just started experimenting with photo jpeg which seems so far to work really well.