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Codec Settings for AE to PP?
Okay…probably the most tiresome question for a newbie to ask, but here goes: What’s the typical settings for creating shots in AE to then be imported and edited in Premiere Pro? This is an all animation project so there’s no footage being shot, just animations in AE. The final output will be the web so probably a 264 compression of high def 1080p footage. I create comps as 1080p 30fps in AE, and could export as lossless Quicktime files, but they are big and clunky to play. I’ve exported under Prores LT format and those files are smaller and play better. Is there a standard codec workflow I should be observing?
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6 Replies
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ideally, you like to stick with as little of compression as possible through the pipeline, so with ae users you’ll find that the lossless animation codec is one of the most common.
however, (as you’ve found) unless you have a super fast raid, it will be hard to playout a file with that kind of rate rate — an uncompressed 1080 frame is about 7MB, at 30fps you need a drive that can sustain nearly 300MB/s just to play a single stream.
there are several codecs out there though that i think you could use to render from ae and import into pp. prores is a good one (you may be able to use the higher 422 if you have it), avid’s dnxhd is just as good, and it is free from avid (search for codecs at avid). and there’s also dvcprohd (or dvcpro100, same thing), it more compressed than prores or dnxhd, but it should still hold up if the final destination is h.264 and it will be less than half the data rate/size of the other two.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks so much for the advice. I’ll experiment with these. I’m coming to Premiere from FCP and accustomed to transcoding footage (usually to Prores) so it causes as little CPU stress as possible. I know Premiere can cut natively in almost anything, but assume the less compressed the footage the less taxing on the CPU and the faster playbacks.
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[Dale Kutzera] “the less compressed the footage the less taxing on the CPU and the faster playbacks.”
typically the more compressed the footage, the more cpu is needed to decompress, however the trade off is the more compressed the file is, the less bandwidth (data rate) is needed to play back…
so your trading cpu load for drive load — or streaming load if your talking about steaming bandwidth.
for instance, dvcprohd carries more processing overhead than say photo-jpeg at 95 quality, but you can play back dvcprohd smoothly from a firewire drive, while the same footage with photo-jpeg would probaly require at least a sata2 drive.
so there is a bit of balance that you want to have between the two. i do think that your core i3 processors can handle the 3 codecs that i mentioned before without any trouble (if you are mixing many streams, then perhaps you’ll see some issues).
i also think that if your media is on a stat2 bus (like the internal bus of your system likely is) then any of those codecs should work fine (again, many simultaneous streams may cause issues).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Not mixing streams if I understand your meaning. The project is entirely of footage created in AE. I’m going to try the Prores HQ as it seems to support alpha channels. Thanks again for the great info.
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by mixing streams, i meant say you overlap 8 clips in a timeline, all set to 50% opacity, or various blending modes or something like that. 8 hd clips playing back simultaneously would be fairly taxing on most systems (both cpu and drive).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I just tried ProRes 444 and while it does support the alpha channels….it creates huge files. A couple Gigs for a 10 second clip. So that’s not gonna work for me. So my work flow research goes on.
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