What file format I use for video rendering

[bliuska]

People often ask me what kind of video formats I use when I render final animation from After Effects, or preview for clients. So I decided to share my rendering habits with you.
Let’s say you have imaginary 3D project and you need to show it for client, make DVD and upload it to youtube or vimeo. So when your 3D scene is finished you need to render it out and continue working in After Effects.

Cinema 4D
C4D have really comfortable and user friendly render settings panel. Just go to Save section and you have all format settings, but witch one to use? If you have a simple scene, and it looks good, you don’t plan to adjust separate passes like shadow, diffuse, etc. in After Effects, then i prefer to export TARGA image sequence. I can say that .tga is one of my favorite image formats, it can store up to 32 bits image data and extra 8-bit alpha channel. So if it’s simple scene with or without alpha channel, just render out .tga sequence and it will get job done.
If you have complicated scene, where you want to adjust shadow or other passes in AE, cinema 4D have an awesome Multi Pass render option. And then you need two file formats, for Regular image i suggest to leave a old good .tga and for Multi-Pass image I choose Photoshop (psd) image sequences. And there is another option to save After Effects project file. I always use it, then after C4D finishes rendering you need just to open AE project file, and you have all Multi-Passes as separate layers then it’s super easy to adjust them.
With other 3D applications it’s pretty much the same deal.

Modo 401
In modo I always use .tga, what a surprise! Modo multi pass rendering is a bit different than in cinema, in modo you need to create Render Output layers in shader tree and choose what effect it have. One is always Final Color, and you can add other like shadow density, reflection shading, etc. And for each of them you need to set up output filename and format. When it finishes rendering you need manually import it to After Effects.

You can read about After Effects part in my blog

[Tagger]

depending on the pass i would use different formats, a diffuse pass i would render in something higher then targa (targa is 24 bit, 8 bits per color + 8 bit alpha = their version of calling it 32 bit), formats like 16 bit tiff or 16/32 bit float exr can store a lot more data. depending on how complex your other passes are you can go down to targa if you want to save diskspace for some (like alphapasses etc).

as for clients, initially mpeg1 (still the most universal format for mailing) going to h264 on an ftp and prores for inhouse viewing seems to be common.

[bliuska]

well yes sometimes when I need more data in file I use Open exr sequence.
But then in after effects you need to check Preserve RBG in file interpretation options for true colors.

[Void]

If you were really serious, you wouldn't be using after effects for exr float files :P

[scrimski]

Don't use AE for encoding, neither MPEG or anything else apart from single frame sequences to uncompressed video.
TOns of dedicated encding softwares which do a better job, even for free.

[bliuska]

Don't use AE for encoding, neither MPEG or anything else apart from single frame sequences to uncompressed video.
TOns of dedicated encding softwares which do a better job, even for free.

I think it's worth to try. Witch one of those softwares do you recomend?

[scrimski]

I'm on Mac wih FCS so I use Compressor a lot. Other choices would be Adobe Media Encoder or Sorensen Squeeze.
QT Pro is OK too but lacks the abilityof processing batched jobs.