best way to render an animation?

[azazel]

I use tga, it's uncompressed, but contains alpha channel, and it's readable for almost every compositing/editing software. You could try tiff with lzw compression, but there are compatibility issues sometimes.

[Panupat]

yea TGA are bullet proof format :D

[Andrew W]

If you can encode your Targas with Run Length Encoding (RLE) then that will probably save you some disk space especially if you have large areas of flat colour.

SGI format isn't bad either, and most compositing packages read them, you'll need to download a free plug-in to use them with Photoshop however.

All the best,

Andrew

[playmesumch00ns]

TIFFs are the best... but you can get into trouble when one package supports a feature another doesn't use. Like LZW compression... damn extendable file formats

[Critterslayer]

ok I think i'll try TGA and TIFF

thanks guys!

[Lique]

you might want to try PNG as well. It stores alpha channel and has smaller size than Targa. Suppose the quality is the same as Targa. but im not 100% sure.

[Glenfx]

Use .Iff, it has BMP/TGA quality at a JPG size :), no compression and can handle Alpha channel.

I think Only maya supports this format though :P and is perfect for shake :)

[Andrew W]

Use .Iff, it has BMP/TGA quality at a JPG size :), no compression and can handle Alpha channel.

I think Only maya supports this format though :P and is perfect for shake :) But I don't think Combustion does, or at least it didn't in past versions. Not sure whether After Effects or Motion support it.

A

PS Targa, SGI and the mighty TIFF all support alpha channels of course.

[gga]

Well, what is the best image format to render to? what i mean is, what is the smallest file size possible, yet with no loss of quality? There is not a clear answer. Depends on all the following factors:
- image depth used (256 colors, 8-bit, 16-bit, float, high-range)
- software packages you'll be taking that image to (includes renderer, paint package, compositing, etc)
- speed of reading the image back vs. compression (what's more important to you. The better the image compresses, the slower it usually it takes to read and decompress, which is important in compositing mainly)
- if you need support mipmap or tiled images (usually needed to bring image back into the renderer and dealing with heavy scenes)
- you need to support an alpha channel, zchannel or other arbitrary channels.
- you need additional information saved on the file (ie. colorimetry, matrices, date of creation, etc)
- you need to store shadow map information, environment map information, etc.
- you care about not infringing any compression patents
- you care about the format being well documented and with source code.

I'm attaching a relatively simple table showing the differences between some common formats.
Overall, for most work openexr and tiffs should be the best formats, except if you will be doing heavy compositing, in which case a simple RLE format like maya's iff may be better.
As usual, your mileage and needs may vary.

[eks]

hey gga!!

that´s an amazing table!!! thanks a lot! :bounce:

i did not knew tiff had z-channel. i was using RPF to use after effect´s depth of field, but will try that with tiff now, rpf are HUGE...




eks

[gga]

hey gga!!

that´s an amazing table!!! thanks a lot! :bounce:

i did not knew tiff had z-channel. i was using RPF to use after effect´s depth of field, but will try that with tiff now, rpf are HUGE...

eks
Note that table is not complete. Still missing rla, rpf, png, mental images' ct and mt formats, and many others. Some of them I don't have that much experience in production with.

TIFFs, like EXR, is an extendable format, so in principle it can support almost anything.
The headache is mostly trying to get everyone to agree on similar extensions to all packages and then having all vendors actually add the support for the feature.

I doubt you will find many packages supporting all the stuff that tiff or exr allows, so testing is the only way sometimes.

Watch out also with z depth in that it can be encoded in several ways (and each renderer kind of has its own convention): 1/z, -1/z or z.

[Critterslayer]

WOW! I love the table! thanks. did you make it??

[dmaas]

Very good to have all that info collected in one place.

Minor nit: PRMan and txmake do support LZW TIFF compression. It's just turned off by default. I would be mighty pissed if they dropped it. TIFF's other lossless compression modes aren't as good.

I hope going forward we can all settle on one of the extensible formats like TIFF or EXR. I'd much rather see new features implemented as new channel types or metadata tags, as opposed to completely new file formats.

BTW you missed Cineon :).

[gga]

I hope going forward we can all settle on one of the extensible formats like TIFF or EXR. I'd much rather see new features implemented as new channel types or metadata tags, as opposed to completely new file formats.

Don't hold your breath on that one. If an extensible format was enough to suit everyone, truth is that we should all really be using Amiga's IFF as it was probably the first extensible format in the industry (well, we still kind of do, as Maya's IFF is really a variation on the good old amiga iff).
Part of the issue with extensible formats is two-fold. Unless everyone extends it in the same way, documents the extension and creates open source readers/writers for it, any new extension is not worth much.
And all extensible formats, invariably end up being much more bulky than formats that are designed just to excel at a single task.

PS. Table is updated with more stuff.

[dmaas]

Agreed on that. It's definitely a social issue, not a technical one.

I do find it a shame how each new file format has to "re-invent" features like arbitrary metadata storage, compression, tiling, etc.

Maybe we just need to extend existing formats, but give them a new name, so that people don't get the impression it will be backwards-compatible? (e.g. "TIFF2" or something)

I hear digital (still) camera companies are currently working on some kind of new file format for storing raw HDR data. It's like "ARGH! Just use TIFF or EXR!"

[playmesumch00ns]

Exr all the way. Had its teething troubles, but the sooner everyone adopts it, the better.

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