which video codec should i use?

[jbills]

it depends on what you want to use it for.

uncompressed will obviously leave you with the highest quality, but yeah... highest filesize.

if all you're going to do eventually is dump out to TV with a miniDV camera for example, then you might be able to work with miniDV most of the way. it should give you real time playback and your editing app (if you're using one) will love you for it. a lot of people also like quicktime > photojpeg @ 92%. but you don't want to sacrifice quality.

uncompressed, there are lots of codecs that have decent filesize, probably much better than a raw AVI. you might try quicktime > animation @ 100%. that's probably the most popular and versatile. Blackmagic has a nice codec that a lot of editors are latching onto, and it's 10bit, too. apple also added some 10 bit lovin' to quicktime, so there are other options there.

and for image files, there's EXR - using piz compression results in floating pt files that are pretty darn compact.

if you give us more info on what you're trying to do, maybe we can suggest something more relevant.

but the general rule is uncompressed for intermediate renders, and compressed only on final output. (if you can stand not having real time playback)

[beaker]

As Jbills says it depends your pipeline, so give us a little incite into what you are doing with these files.

Personally I prefer sequential images files for everything except the editing and final output. Most editing packages just don't handle image sequences very well. Also this allows you to make lowrez proxy file in jpg format which load extremely fast while you work and swap them out for higher quality EXR , tiff, iff, etc.. when you render.

Many compositors like DF, Shake, Nuke, etc... only load the part of the image that it needs. So when you have a quicktime it often times has to load huge amounts of the movie into ram, where an image sequence it only has to grab the single frame or even better, just the section of that image that it needs (some image formats are saved in scanlines or blocks that can be randomly accessed without loading the entire file into memory). So image sequences are much faster to work with because of this.

[deadweight]

thanks guys, heres somemore info. im working on some animation using cinema 4d, i would like the quality to be high enough so that it looks good on a tv. im trying outputing the sequence as tiffs then importing the tiffs into premiere for editing this seems to be what most people suggest i do and then compressing the final video i produce

[beaker]

Except for online editors like Smoke or Fire, most are pretty horrible/slow at handling image sequences. I would just use a lossless codec inside premiere.

[gs1creative]

There's a commercial product called picvideo3, that has a lossless mjpeg codec which compresses to about half the size of an uncompressed avi. I've also used Quicktime mjpeg b at 100% which seemed to work very well when sent to TV.

Cheers

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