Compression and playback suggestions for 720P animation

[tricky]

I'm coming to the end of an animation job which has beeen rendered and edited at 1080x720 (720P) resolution.

h.264 Quicktime the way to go?

[AJ Jefferies]

What's it going to be used for?

[MathTheRender]

yes, but you have to keep an eye on (if you have any) the soft color fades, they may have some comprimation relicts. a *mov with JPEG 75% codec works nice but gets you quite big files. but dont get under the value of 75%.

if you find out something better let us (me) know.

[tammo]

I do my postwork in AfterEffects and export to a single Quicktime File with the PNG codec.
It's a standard QuickTime codec, it's lossless, much smaller then uncompressed and holds an alpha channel.

This is also the file that i upload to clients if they continue to work with my Animations.

When i need smaller files because i don't have so much time to upload i use quicktime-PhotoJPG 95% Quality setting.
This is slightly lossy but not detectable with human eyes.

Quicktime PhotoJPG 95% is also the codes that the stock footage supplier Artbeats uses on all of their files.

If you just make a final version for playback that will not be changed anymore use h264.
But it's difficult to get all the export settings right.

Take a look at the h264 wiki page to understand the basics.
The most important settings are bitrate, profile and levels if you go HD.

"Levels" is a limiter to make sure that h264 plays back smoothly on less powerful hardware.
If you set that to 5.1 you can even encode with film like resolutions like 4,096×2,048.

[dlparisi]

If you just make a final version for playback that will not be changed anymore use h264.
But it's difficult to get all the export settings right.

Personally I have never been able to get an h264 video to look correct, the gamma is always messed up whether I export out of AE, Premiere, or super. I gave up and purchased quicktime pro, opened the uncompressed quicktime, hit export and checked h264 and it came out perfect.

[cheerioboy]

Having Quicktime Pro is essential. I always do some sort of adjustments to my animations through After Effects and render out an uncompressed .mov. Then I use Quicktime Pro to compress it into an h264. I still have problems with h264 being washed out. The solution can be found here -- http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/200...e-gamma-shift/ -- basically setting the Transparency to straight alpha in the video movie properties seems to do the trick!

[val2]

Quicktime pro or windows media encoder are the two best I think. I use the windows media encoder x64 and find it is remarkably good, no washed out problems to fix and it's a free download.

[tricky]

Thankyou all for your suggestions. I must say that the easiest way so far has been using Quicktime Pro on an uncompressed Quicktime file. In the past, I have always used Quicktime movies with jpeg compression: I will no doubt give that a go and compare the result.

[tricky]

Personally I have never been able to get an h264 video to look correct, the gamma is always messed up whether I export out of AE, Premiere, or super. I gave up and purchased quicktime pro, opened the uncompressed quicktime, hit export and checked h264 and it came out perfect.

I've found the same thing with the gamma/levels of the h.264 output. How annoying.

[mike_kennedy]

http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/200...e-gamma-shift/

[dlparisi]

How annoying.

Totally. It's amazing how everything I've tried exhibits the same behavior: is it adobe, quicktime, other??? None of the supposed "fixes" ever woked either to get the gamma correct either.