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Puzzled about codecs
I’m new to video editing and encoding. I have this 10 minute composition in After Effects that I’m trying to render with as high a quality as possible. The video file should be 100-150 megs.
However, a couple of things I don’t understand are
– Why can’t I select a decent audio codec in the render settings (like mp3)? E.g. when I choose Xvid Mpeg-4 as video it will just grey out the Format Options button for Audio.
– what is this talk of rendering it without any compression first and then converting? Why is that better? Also I don’t quite have acres of space on my hard-drive. How much room would 10megs of 800×500 video with audio take?I would appreciate any help and suggestions.
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1 Reply
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After Effects doesn’t have the world’s greatest compression settings. It’s not part of its job.
Quality and size-wise, it’s much better to render out at a lossless codec and bring the video into Premiere (or similar) and render out your final footage. Plus if you don’t achieve the right compression first time, your PC doesn’t have to rerender all the effects you’ve applied. it only needs to compress the video again.
Personally, a short-cut for lossless codec thst I use is to render out of AE in the Microsoft DV codec. It’s the codec I capture in through Premiere and for the quality of camera we use (pro-sumer) it’s good enough without being unusably large.
Graham
https://www.quinceweb.com – web design
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https://www.shiveringcactus.bravehost.com – Free FX for amateur films
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