Edit in Animation Codec ?

[David Roth weiss]

You would be much better off using a PNG or TGA sequence. FCP does not particularly work well with QTs using the animation codec.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Bret Williams]

I guess you need alpha channel? Otherwise you’d be better off using a codec supported by your system like a standard 8 bit uncompressed codec. Animation is a compressed format.

[David Roth weiss]

Brett,

32-bit sequential TGAs or PNGs are such a brainer for this purpose. They are truly universal and carry an alpha channel too.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

typo in post above, sorry

[Bret Williams]

IMHO – A horrible idea. To each his own. But can’t stand working with sequential files. A pain to keep up with, eats all your ram for breakfast, and a media management nightmare too. They require nesting to do speed effects or just keep them in general order. Yuck.

[Espnetboy3]

I thought animation codec was uncompressed. When I go to file>export what should I use? None? I thought animation looked better than the None option.

[David Roth weiss]

Brett,

So far you’ve given this guy no constructive advice he can actually use.

Since he does need a solution with an alpha channel, and since the animation codec is not well supported in FCP, 32-bit sequential animation files happen to be a solution that works, even if you make them sound worse than global warming.

I use sequential targa files routinely and the sky is not falling, I’m still very much alive and kicking, and I’m getting my work out the door without issues. And, if my RAM is being eaten for breakfast, it certainly seems to have no discernable impact on anything I’m doing.

DRW

[Bob Flood]

DRW

so does fcp play still seq’s without rendering?

i have tried both straight animation AND “Sheer” rgba and yuva codecs and they dont play in real time either

bee eph

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[David Roth weiss]

[Bob Flood] “so does fcp play still seq’s without rendering?”

Sure Bob!!! For the most part its no problem, at least with SD. I haven’t done anything with lots of layering with HD-sized targas. You always have to render eventually, and maybe even in some spots where you might have lots of things going on, but its nothing worrisome.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Andy Gallagher]

Sounds like you need to adjust your sequence settings (Apple-zero) to use the Animation codec. My company does this all the time – no serious problems, really. Though make sure that your disks are fast enough to lift the data, if they can handle uncompressed then it should be ok.

FYI, as I understand it Animation is ‘lossless’ compression, i.e. it’ll looks as good as uncompressed. It does this by ‘run-length’ encoding, i.e. if you’ve got a load of black pixels, instead of repeatedly having ‘black pixel’ listed in the frame it’ll effectively say ‘black pixel, repeat x times’. Hence it’s good for animation, where you tend to have large blocks of colour, but not so good for ‘real’ footage with a lot of subtle tones.

Correct me if I’m wrong too, but I think that ‘None’ is a straight uncompressed RGB data (think not supporting alpha channels but am not sure) which can look wrong if you’re using camera footage which tends to be shot in YUV because the colours have been converted. ‘8-bit uncompressed’ and ’10-bit uncompressed’ are uncompressed YUV, which should keep your colours looking the same. But the default FCP ‘x-bit uncompressed’ codecs aren’t PC-compatible so we usually use Animation.

Personally, I find image sequences ungainly to use in FCP, unless anyone can tell me a good way of combining all of the frames into one video clip short of exporting it and then importing the MOV.

Good luck!