Export Filesize check…

[Andy George]

I’ve made a 2min 16s clip and exported it under “Best settings” Quicktime and “Lossless” Output with default audio.

The “lossless” codec is the Animation codec. It creates very large files, 7gigs sounds about right.

The playback is choppy, Im guessing, because you are trying to play it off of a single hard drive. You would need multiple hard drives in a raid array to get the kind of throughput that you need to play an animation encoded file. The file is probabbly fine in other words, your computer just is not fast enough to play it.

Is there a better setting to give me good quality with a reasonable filesize?
There are a variety of lossless codecs, some are smaller but not by a bunch.
Rather than choosing a codec based on it’s file size, you should select one that is going to
work best for your particular composition.

The Animation codec works well for…Animations. Think clean lines and little gradiant.
If your working with footage that was shot and imported you might have better luck with a PNG or Tiff sequence. Proress 422 is another if your running FCP.

Is it possible to say I would like a 10,000 kbps file and scale to that ratio?
Not using a lossless codec.

The normal workflow is to export lossless from AE and then compress in a compression application like apple compressor or media encoder if you need to create a smaller file at that point. After Effects is not a compressions program and lacks a lot of the features that compression applications use to make great looking tiny video’s.

But what do you want to do with the resulting smaller file? It would no longer be usefull for editing and any further compression applied to it would only result in compounding the previos compression artifacts that might not be visible in the first pass.

-Andy George
Senior Editor
http://www.chiselindustries.com

[Doug Lee]

Thanks so much Andy!

I guess I’m an AE baby.

Here’s where I’m up to.
I’ve finished my composition in AE.
It’s a photo slideshow for a friends 21st.

But I don’t know how to create the video file that I can chuck onto an external HDD/USB to play it.

So you reckon the “Animation” Setting is best for this?

Many thanks again

[Kevin Camp]

[Doug Lee] “It’s a photo slideshow for a friends 21st.”

render to quicktime lossless animation, then compress to a suitable codec/bandwidth using a compression app.

you could use adobe’s media encoder which was probably installed with ae (version cs4+), but i still use mpeg streamclip a lot. if you try mpeg stream clip, try exporting to mpeg4 using h.264, multipass and b frames. you should get a good quality file out of that, that should play off just about anything — it’s also good for vimeo, you tube and client approval.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Doug Lee]

Many thanks Kevin!
I shall try that for my project.