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Should I export or render for this purpose?
This is music video shot in PAL miniDV and I cut it in premiere and then made color corrections and effects in AE. The video is 5 minutes 30 seconds long. It will go to the band’s website where you can watch it.
1. What would be good size for the video? I think more than 100mb is too big?
2. What is the best way to get reasonable file size with good quality?
3. Should I drop the resolutin to half? From 768×576 to 384×288? I think this is necessary for getting reasonable file size with video 5 minutes long.
4. I’ve been using export -> QuickTime -> H.246 and MPEG4-video settings before but with these settings and in full resolution the video would be about 320mb. So what should I do? -
4 Replies
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Personally, I never use the export option simply because rendering provides more options. If you want the best quality possible and the smallest file size, I would do the following:
1. Render out to half resolution. Most online videos are not full size anyway, and would choke average computers.
2. Render to MPEG-4 or H.264, and experiment with bitrate settings. Somewhere around 800Kbps is a good starting point, and is a good tradeoff between quality and size.
3. Do not render out to 29.97fps. Almost all online videos are 15fps, and I assure you it looks just as good, but cuts your file size in half. You would think the motion would be affected by cutting frame rate in half, but it looks fine every time.
I would also consider a better workflow – render out to an uncompressed/lossless format like the Quicktime Animation Codec, and then use a third party app for your web compression. They almost always do a better job than After Effects at compression, resulting in better quality and smaller files. On the PC there is a little app called Super that is free and encodes to a wide variety of codecs.
https://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html
I would also consider compressing to flash video. It is similar to h.264 in terms of quality vs. file size, and something like 98% of web users (both mac and PC) have the flash player installed so you get around compatibility issues. Again, there is a free encoder for PCs called Riva Encoder that does a great job.
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15fps? We shot in 25fps progressive mode with Panasonic DVX100. So it wont change the look of the motion in the video?
Do you need to install some codec so you can watch H.264 videos? If yes, I think flash would be better then. Not everyone want or can install extra stuff to their computers…
Noob question, you render through “composition -> make movie…”?
I will render with AE and also with Super and compare the results.
Thanks for your quick answers.
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I made little tests and this is what I got.
Both are using QuickTime H.264, full resolution, best quality settings. First one is Exported and second one is Rendered:
https://koti.tnnet.fi/hiost/e.jpg
So in this case exported looks way better. Also the file size is smaller in exported video. Exported 10,2mb rendered 12,6mb.
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I also made 12fps, 13fps and 15fps versions and they looked very bad. I have to go with 25fps.
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