What are the best render settings?

[Chris Evans]

Until you’re rendering for delivery, you should keep everything as high quality as possible. For that situation, I’d render an .avi or .mov with no codec or animation codec. Or you could do a PNG sequence.

[Jeff Pulera]

What Chris said. H.264 is a delivery codec, very highly compressed, so you don’t want to composite with that!

While Uncompressed video is the ultimate, the file sizes are outrageous. I often use the free Lagarith .avi codec for PC, which is mathematically lossless, so really providing the same quality as uncompressed – with much smaller files.

https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

On a Mac, you could use ProRes HQ as your intermediate.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Sarah Lozano]

Is this something you download and load into premiere?

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Sarah,

Download to PC, RUN, then the codec is installed and will be available in any app such as Premiere or After Effects or any other editing software. Choose AVI as the format, then Lagarith should be available under Codec drop down.

Have Adobe apps closed when installing any new codec.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Sarah,

Just downloaded and installed Lagarith in this machine, took 5 seconds total. Use the first option that says “Installer”.

Opened up Premiere and there it was! In Export settings, choose Format = AVI. For the Preset below, it will say “DV NTSC” or something, just leave that. Then go down to VIDEO tab and hit the drop down arrow for CODEC and choose Lagarith there.

You WILL need to change Frame Size, Frame Rate, Field Order, and Pixel Aspect to match your source video (same as source Sequence Settings). You can look at Source and Output to make sure it all matches (circled on image). After changing settings, Preset name will change to “Custom”.

Once all set up correctly, SAVE the Preset for next time, then just choose AVI and Your Preset, and Export.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Andrew Berekdar]

Have you considered using Adobe Dynamic Link?

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/atv/cs6-tutorials/send-work-from-premiere-pro-to-after-effects.html