Type of Codecs to use for rendering
by Andrew Park
on
Aug 3, 2008 at 6:17:53 am
Hello, before I get into my main problem, I just joined the Creative Cow and I really appreciate how much this website has helped me so far..
anyways, I have to make bunch of video clips for my church for various events, and most of the time I would use any variations of Intel Indeo as my codec, but this codec seems to take somewhat of a long time to render. Most of my videos range from 3-10 min but for most of the videos rendering takes minimum of hour and a half.
I tried other codecs as well but even though the rendering is quick the quality seems to be absolutely horrible. Since my videos are shown through a giant projector, I really can't have bad quality videos.
Can anyone suggest a good quality format with somewhat quicker rendering time?
My church just told me to make a 5-8 min video about the mission trip that they just had, and they gave me a day to make it and I can't afford to waste a single minute
Re: Type of Codecs to use for rendering by Dave LaRonde on Aug 4, 2008 at 3:21:53 pm
Now, understand that I'm a Mac guy and not very familiar with the Windows world, okay?
[Andrew Park]"Most of my videos range from 3-10 min but for most of the videos rendering takes minimum of hour and a half. "
Depending on your machine and what you do in AE, that sounds about right. Rendering takes time.
"Since my videos are shown through a giant projector, I really can't have bad quality videos. "
The size of the screen has NO BEARING on your situation. It's the resolution of the playback device. Got a DVD player hooked up to that projector? Your resolution is 720x480 in NTSC-land, and that's all the resolution you get.
"My church just told me to make a 5-8 min video about the mission trip that they just had, and they gave me a day to make it and I can't afford to waste a single minute."
If you're under the gun and they're stills, make a slide show. That's all you can realistically do in such a short time frame, and there isn't anything we can do to help you out on that score. If you can't make one in another piece of software, go to the AE tutorials section of the COW, and look up Andrew Kramer's tutorial on making slide shows in AE. Forget the fancy stuff.
So what codec should you use for this crash project? I'd use Quicktime's Animation codec set to best quality, and I'd use a different application to convert it to the codec you need for your playback device.
You didn't give us a whole lot of information to work with, so it's tough to be helpful for FUTURE projects; you're pretty much in a bind for the present project. We don't know what kinds of footage you typically use in making your videos (real video -- DV, HD, HDV, Beta SP, stills, audio files, etc.), the kinds of codecs used by the footage, your editing application, your playback device... they're all important in how you approach a project.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
