Best practice render format / EXR in After effects

[ben_hamburg]

Hey there,

I am circling back to this again after a while of using PNG exlusively as render output in Vray...
Reason was some fog compositing with a Zbuffer, where I would have liked to have 32 bt instead of 16.

I know that last time I did research on this, I found the All-channels in one file approach in After effects to be too much of a hassle and slow as hell, so I stayed away from that workflow, I know Nuke supposedly handles exr much better, but unfortunately I am stuck with after effects.

So whats the best practice here for that combination?
I am going for 32 bit EXR with save to separate render elements enabled, since tehre doesn?t seem to be an option to just save the Zbruffer as 32 bit and the rest in 16 bit (apart from creating separate render passes of course).

[ijzerman86]

We used to do the same. If you want to use exr in ae render seperate passes, the extractor plugin is just clumsy and slow in my opinion.
Make sure to render to zips per scanline compression. AE seems to prefer scanline over tiles. Downside is the amount of images in a given folder. I use immigration by Lloyd Alvarez (https://aescripts.com/immigration/)
to quickly work with a many files. I found it ok and just as fast to work this way compared to png.