fastest encoding compressor for previewing?

[Steve Forde]

Since we had to benchmark this stuff when shipping Nucleo, I would have to say that Quicktime Animation is the fastest “compressor”. The reason being, there really is no “compression”.

What I mean is, in AE, when you compress using the DV format (or any other codec for that matter), AE will first render a frame, then it will compress the frame to whatever codec you have specified.

By using the QT Animation codec, there really isn’t much in terms of compression, so AE practically skips this step. The only thing that may cause this to be slower, is the time it takes for AE to write the frame into the .mov file. Therefore, if working in say SD or smaller, you may be fine with QT Animation. If working in HD or say 4K, then any savings in time you gained from compressing using QT Animation, will be lost due to the size of the data being written. (Depends on your HDD)

Unfortunately therefore, it all depends. You need to find that fine line between size of data, and compression speed.

Not to mention that you may have no choice but to compress, as your computer may not be able to playback a QT Animation reliably if it is too large. As for other codecs, they are all completely different depending on what you are doing.

Apologies for the vague answer, others may have a better comment.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Roberts]

Why don’t you do a test?

Set up a 10-second render of your comp (a representative sample of the comp’s complexity and pacing), with output module set to the DV codec.
Then duplicate that render item in the queue, but change the codec to Photo-JPEG at 89% or so.
Next, dupe and set to Quicktime Sorenson.
Next, dupe and set to WMV if you’re on Windows.

Hit render, then when you’re done, check the render times for each item. Presumably the times would be proportional to the times of your longer render.
Consider rendering at 15 fps, half-res. Which would leave out DV, I suppose.

Steve