Codecs

[Alan Lorence]

There’s nothing about pIllusion that requires a special codec. For best quality, I recommend:

– Huffy UV (free codec, lossless)
– DivX set to highest bitrate (not lossless, but visually so at the highest bitrates)
– Xvid (similar to DivX)

Alan.
wondertouch

[Moviehawk]

Having similar problems.

PI-se

Cinepak (radius) produces severe pixelization/color stratification.
Huffy 2.2 avi files crash Adobe AE when trying to import.
Huffy 2.1 seems best, but produces huge files. 65MB for a 200 frame 720×480.

Divx 6.2.5 (quality set to 8) produces quality playback and small file size, but won’t load into AE.
(error retrieving frame).

The only method that I have been able to use to get quality output from PI:SE (for use in AE) is to use .tga files.

I’m sure I am doing something wrong, but haven’t figuered it out yet.

Any advise — thanks.

[Montekristo]

Thanks Alan!
Will try it…

[Elvis Deane]

TGA will give you the best quality output with SE, the next best being an uncompressed AVI. Even a highest quality sequences of JPGs can look really good if you need to save the disk space and don’t need an alpha channel.

DIVX and the similar codecs are good for delivering video, but they aren’t very good for editing/compositing with. I don’t know if its still the case, but there used to be an issue when loading a DIVX video into an editing program that scrubbing forward would play at normal rates, but going backwards would slow things down tremendously.

Cinepak should never be used, unless you’re delivering video to someone with a 10 year old computer. It’s an old, slow codec.