Animation frames - PNG or JPGs ? And..... is there a fast way of converting PNGs to JPGs ?

[JezUK]

I read on an Adobe Premiere forum that for animation frames it's better to save as PNGs (for the colour depth) rather than JPGs - so in a moment of not thinking (I use Premiere about once every 4 years) I went with that (normally when I've had to do animations I have saved the frames as JPGs but as I say, for some reason, I hadn't engaged brain)....

Now.... Premiere can't play back in real time - so I went and converted all my PNGs to JPGs (I used Topaz Giga Pixel) - took several hours, but they're converted now.

So, this all might turn out to be a God send in the end because I can use the JPGs as 'proxies' for real time playback and editing in Premiere, and then rendering out the mp4 file using the PNGs

So all is not lost.

But.... for future - I have some questions;

1) JPGs or PNGs ?

2) What's the most efficient and speedy way of converting PNGs to JPGs ? (I feel Giga Pixel is not the fastest, maybe I should have created an automated batch process in Photoshop),

3) Is there ANY way of saving two image file versions of an animation frame directly from 3DS Max ? If so, how ? (maybe Deadline I'm guessing, but I don't like using it, Backburner does the job for me).

Thanks

[fixeighted]

For animation always png I would say, as they don't lose quality like jpegs Then at least when you compile to a movie, depending on the mov type, you won't suffer extra quality loss.
For conversion you were right - P'shop batch is simple enough and done while drinking gin and tonic in the sun
I don't know of any way to simultaneously save 2 file types - would be amazed if it were possible.

[Morne]

I recently used Max's own videopost for this. Nifty little tool that people often forget about
I rendered EXR, piped that into videopost and then let it spit out 6 different filetype sequences for me at same time
I set videopost to simultaneously output PNG's at each option (24bit, 48bit and also 256 colors) then at the same time I also did jpgs at 3 different compression levels

Works a treat. Although videopost is only single threaded, it did the job nicely

[fixeighted]

LOL I never thought of that. I last used the videopost thing probably 20 years ago and assumed it had been stripped out.
Good call!