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Render out to 24 bit color?
I have a Premier Pro (CS5.5) project which when rendered out to uncompressed Microsoft AVI is a huge 51 gigabytes in size. It’s a 12 minute long HD (720p) clip. Many of the scenes have lots of subtle color gradient, and so have been created (mainly in After Effects) at 32 bit color depth.
The rendered, uncompressed AVI file from Premier is perfect, but of course, 51gb is just a tiny bit too much to upload onto the Internet. 🙂
Compressing the file down isn’t a problem of course, and my first choice was to render out the video as a h.264 file @ around 8,000Mbps. This gives me a file at a much more reasonable 600 megabytes. However, I need a color bit depth of at least 24 bits and the h.264 renders I’ve done so far are definitely not that. I’ve made sure to tick the “Render at maximum depth” and “Render at maximum quality” checkboxes in Premier, but no luck.
Should I use a different codec, and if so, which ones offer a color depth of up to 24 bits?
Colin.
PS: I tried a Quicktime render using the Animation preset, and although I get the bit depth I require, I have to lower the quality so much to get a smaller file size that the video quality suffers badly.
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2 Replies
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[Colin Carver] “Should I use a different codec, and if so, which ones offer a color depth of up to 24 bits?”
Use ProRes or DNxHD. Your file will be somewhere around 10-17GB in size (depending on which variety of the codec you use to render out). They are lossy codecs (meaning some of the data is being thrown out). However, they are radically efficient and provide an acceptable trade off between quality and compression.
If you want an uploadable file to the internet (Amazon, Vimeo, YouTube), h.264 is currently the standard. Not too many ways around that – https://vimeo.com/help/compression
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
Thanks for the reply, Ryan. I’ll give your suggestions a try.
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