Baffled by outputs and output sizes for pre-renders...

I am doing a video presentation for a client using AE CS5 on Win7 x64 in a 720 24P project that will end up on DVD and Internet HD, and was shot on Panasonic P2.

Basically it was a live projector Powerpoint presentation that I am now overlaying the graphics on top of so viewers can see them.

Anyhow, to fill in for the laser pointer, I am animating a little arrow around the screen. I am trying to Pre-render that arrow (there are other graphics involved, but I'm pre-rendering different comps in case others need changing), now that I have it set. Well, my first lossless pre-render came to over 120GB! (It's a 1 hr long presentation) It's just an arrow moving over an alpha channel.

Now it doesn't need to be Broadcast perfect, but still should look decent, what would be the recommended render settings that you might use to look good, but keep the file size manageable?

Thanks all!

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If the comp in question is that simple, I wouldn't pre-render it. Unless you have a very fast RAID, it will almost certainly take the computer longer to read the frames from disk into memory than it would to simply calculate the transformation on the arrow graphic layer.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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