Need a little advice

#1

hi there, I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction.

Everytime I render out an animation, I import it into after effects for a little compositing. But when I render it out to a quicktime file, the file is rather large. I know you can make it small (as in file size) but im abit confused as to what im actually looking to learn, is it video encoding, or something else. Also if there are any good pref free programs I can use that would be mucho great. I know its something I should already know. Im in my 3rd year at Uni now and should have really looked into it sooner. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

#2

It´s normal, that your rendered images / movies are quite big, since you should always render to an uncompressed format. I recommend using Tiff or openEXR (both offer lossles compression) image sequences, instead of quicktime movies. QT only supports 8-Bit Color depth, can mess with your gamme and should your renderer unexpectedly crash you can loose all results, instead of just one frame.

Compression, which affects image quality, is something you add to your final (and also uncompressed) result. Otherwise you loose quality with every step you make. Harddrives are big and cheap nowerdays, so working uncompresed shouldn´t be an issue.

#3

Im afraid youve miss understood me friend. I do render form Maya out to tiff fromat. Its after that When I actually doing compositing in after effects which I render the final composition out to a quick time file ( as requested by my lecturer) those files ten to be huge. Sorry if I did not explain that properly.

Its not really an issue as such, it just becomes a problem when playng back the final composition for lecturers whom are using tiny laptops so the uncompressed QT file doesnt playback as smoothly.

#4

what codec are you using? H264 for example creates very small files. Also I would use a dedicated compressor application like quicktime pro instead of After effects. It will create far smaller files.

LordSaddler: quick note, quicktime is not limited to 8 bit, there are many 10 and 16 bit codecs.

#5

its all good I got it sorted. Thanks though.

#6

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