What’s the Best Format to Export?

[David Bogie]

There are really only two choices:
1. The native codec in which you are building your Premiere show.
2. Animation.

You’ll need to supply a bit more information like what kinds of effects you’re using in AE and why (instead of editing effects directly in Premiere) and what motivates your need for quality. “Quality” is often mistaken around here for resolution and color depth.

bogiesan

[Kevin Camp]

you might want to look into adobe’s dynamic link feature… i don’t have premiere pro, so i’m not too familiar with it, but my understanding of how it works is that it will allow passing projects from pp to ae and ae to pp, reducing the intermediate step of rendering/exporting footage from one to the other…

i’m sure adobe has some good tutorials on it, check their site and the manual for more info. you might also check the pp forum here too.

but to get back to your question, it depends a bit…

the short answer is render to quicktime’s lossless animation codec. advantages: it’s losslessly compressed, supports an alpha channel and is widely supported. the negatives: it generally creates large files with high data rates and it only works in 8-bit color.

but their are a lot of things to consider…

first off, the vast majority of the time you’ll want to render, not export. rendering (composition>add to render queue) will offer more options/control for rendering, plus it will use ae’s multiprocessing, if enabled.

ideally, you’ll output to a lossless/uncompressed codec that supports the color depth that your footage is in. ie, if you captured 10-bit, you’d like to render back to a 10-bit codec, if you captured 8-bit then rendering to 8-bit is fine.

lossless and uncompressed codecs create very large files, with high data rates, that can be fairly demanding on a system. most nle’s will convert those codecs to their working codecs anyway, so, often a good choice is to render to the same codec that you’re working with in premiere, unless that codec uses temporal compression (mpeg-2, mpeg-4, h.264, hdv are common codecs that use temporal compression). ae won’t work too well with those codecs, so you should use codecs that only use intraframe compression (dv, dvcpro, dvcprohd, prores 422, avid dnxhd, photo-jpeg, lossless animation are common codecs that use intraframe compression).

if you need alpha transparency (maybe you’re creating some name keys or transition effects), then there are fewer options. for those i’d go with lossless animation with alpha. for tips for render with alpha, check this tutorial:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/straight_vs_premult.php

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW