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What File Type Is Best For Image Sequencing?
I found Adobe docs talk about “how-to” but can’t seem to find anything on what file type to use.
JPG is a compressed format that in Flash we don’t use until the end of a process to avoid loss of resolution. People use JPGs for After Effects? Gosh, I would think there’s so many stages in broadcast media that JPG would be the last thing people use.
I would think using PNGs or something would help preserve resolution. Is that wrong?
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8 Replies
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Cool, good to know. I’ll get use to seeing and working with JPGs as a standard.
Just for measure, I was referring mainly to, like, compositing and such. I imagine that upon export it could be any number of formats depending on the client.
Er…that’s my guess at least. Being a noob my definitions aren’t always clear.
Thanks Dave!
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Oh okay, right. Yeah, it’s just that I’m used to using Flash which the terminology is export/publish. Render, render, render…
I just read in this book I bought by Mark Christiansen (haven’t gotten to it, read the intro to know I’m not ready for it just yet) and he talks about how in workflow it’s safer to import a sequence of images rather than an MOV format in case of corruption. Which in my experience can possibly happen to any SWF format if it’s compressed enough. The thing is with After Effects is that you’re sourcing a file not embedding it. So making comp versions won’t address a corrupt MOV, right? That was my motivation for image sequences, more importing than rendering at the moment.
I’ve been focusing mostly on the editing stage of workflow. Haven’t gotten to exp…rendering yet. That’s a good reminder about JPGs though. That’d be an ugly morning to wake up to a bunch of black space filling the motion.
Thanks Dave! 😀
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I have never used a JPEG sequence. I have used PNG and Targa though.
If you’re new to AE, this is a great place to start.
– 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.
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Great, thanks Michael! In my off-time I’m soaking up as much as I can. Currently working through the use of expressions. Knowing ActionScript is going to come in handy. I’ve already jumped through 125 pages of Mr. Geduld’s book.
I’ll add this to my stack of material! 😀
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Hehehe, yeah, it sounded like a whole other rendering schedule.
Probably a quicker fix would have a spare copy of the QT file. Duh, don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I guess when learning you put on blinders with what you read a lot of the time.
Thanks!
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If you’re compositing with image sequences then I recommend Tiff Lzw off trillions+. You’ll have all the perfect 16 bit quality that’s still smaller than PSD’s. Targas shift pixels around from my tests and PNG’s use Lzw compression which is lossy.
https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Nuh-uh. LZW is mathematically lossless, i.e. what you get out is bit-for-bit the same as what you put in.
LZW just removes redundancy in the file, without any processing of the image. That’s how it can be used for any file — LZW is the same compression used to compress a zip file. So it’s a lot faster than image-aware compression, but a lot less efficient. That’s why TIFFs are still way bigger than JPEGs, even with LZW on.
Stephen Dixon
Editor, Animator, Motionographer
Museum Victoria -
you’re right, it is…now.
i think this was a bug back in ae cs3 or cs5.5 because it wasn’t supposed to be and pissed me off. its fixed now for anyone interested. ae cc 2015.
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