Looking for best settings for animations

[James Daniels]

I was hoping someone could tell me what the best format for graphics and animations to use with Edius is? I have tried a few different file formats (.mov, .avi, .mpg, and so on) and codecs with each. Most of them work fine but we are still having problems when printing to tape. We are trying to eliminate having to render anything out when printing tape.

Is there one format that is better then another?

Is there a format that's good for animations with key/alpha channels?

Just trying to eliminate lots of trial and error

Thanks for any help.

[GrassValley_BH]

Is this for rendering animations in other programs to use in EDIUS, or for rendering out of EDIUS?

If it's for using in EDIUS, then use the Canopus HQ codec - that'll give you alpha and be both quality-preserving and easy to use in EDIUS.

If it's for going out of EDIUS, nothing you do at this time will preserve alpha, as anything transparent becomes black.

[James Daniels]

Looking for settings when rendering from After Effects to import into Edius

[STORMDAVE]

Personally I use Canopus Lossless at 24bit (non Alpha) and 32bit. The files are twice smaller than using Uncompressed. Canopus HQ is excellent too, but I am a quality freak...

As far as preserving your animation, your best bet is to render to a Sequence such as TGA (32bit if you need Alpha) then importing that image sequence into AE and exporting out to Canopus Lossless (or HQ). Then backup your image sequence for future use.

Canopus Lossless plays in realtime for me (SD is about ~13MB/sec).

I stay away from importing QT files in Edius.

I work under OSX in AE, so everything I do there, I always export QT Animation @ 100. I then boot into Windows and import that into another program (not Edius) and then export to Canopus Lossless so I can use it in Edius correctly.