Best way to export

[Steve Roberts]

It all depends on what you want to do with it once it’s out of AE:

Play on a hard drive only?
Play on CD?
Play on the web?
Burn to DVD?
Send to a non-linear editor?
Broadcast on TV?
Record to DV tape?

Let us know,
Steve

[Zack Bryne]

Play on the web is all i need so far

[Steve Roberts]

Well, then:

If you’re on Windows, render using “Make Movie” to open the render queue. Set your render settings to Best, but 15 fps. Open the Output Module settings, set Stretch to 320×240 and render to Windows Media under “Format”. You can mess around with these settings under “Format Options” to tweak quality once you’ve done a few.

If you’re on a Mac, do the same thing but render to Quicktime Movie format in the Output module, and to the Sorenson codec under Format Options. Ideally (in my opinion), you should render to the Sorenson Pro codec for best quality with small file size, but you have to buy that codec.

Hope that gets you started,
Steve

[Zack Bryne]

Thank you.

[Steve Roberts]

No problem.

Keep these tips in mind:

1. Render through “make movie” rather than file>export if you can. I only use file>export for .dv stream and SWF export.
2. Quicktime’s Animation codec is the preferred codec to preserve quality when you are sending the file to another app for further encoding, such as a DVD MPEG-2 encoder. Animation codec movies won’t play smoothly on most hard drives, though. It’s an imtermediate (not deliverable) codec.
3. Photo-JPEG (quicktime) at just less than 100% is a good storage codec, and is playable on most hard drives nowadays.
4. Note that the Animation codec preserves quality, whether that quality is good or bad. The same goes for any codec in a way: no codec can improve the quality of a movie, and plenty of them (“lossy” codecs) are designed to degrade the image somewhat for the sake of a small file size. That part is often unavoidable, but codecs are getting better every day.

Onward!
Steve