Rendering Settings

[Michael Szalapski]

You selected to render your composition as a JPEG sequence.

Your final output will vary depending on your intended use (You’d use different compression for YouTube than you would for Blu-ray).

However, out of AE, I would suggest you render a lossless file and use the Adobe Media Encoder, Quicktime Pro, or any other dedicated compression software to do your final compression. h.264 is a pretty popular one for HD video and it benefits greatly from multipass encoding which AE cannot do by itself.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Justin L.]

After I render the animation, I plan on putting it on Sony Vegas to incorporate with the rest of my video. What settings do you recommend?

[Michael Szalapski]

Do you need any alpha information for this render? Some formats support it while others don’t.

Be warned, these suggestions are uncompressed video and uncompressed video creates some pretty large file sizes.
You could do an uncompressed AVI.
You could do Quicktime with the Animation Codec.
You could do Quicktime with the PNG codec.
You can test what works best for you. I’d suggest the Quicktime with the PNG codec if you’re working with video footage or similar things, because it tends to have the smallest file sizes. Now, if you’re doing strictly animation, the Animation codec may have the smaller file sizes. In any case these are all technically lossless file types which means you won’t lose any quality.

Now, if you don’t mind a tiny loss of quality, you could also try Quicktime with the JPG codec set at around 80-90% and you’ll have even smaller file sizes. It’s still going to be large compared to the rather compressed video that comes off of your camcorder.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Justin L.]

These won’t create millions of jpegs in my desktop right? lol.

And is it normal for my 15 sec footage to render for hours and hours? ‘Cause I was a little surprised.