Best Compression Settings for Quality and File Size?

[Rez007]

Hello Everyone,

I had a quick question that I am hoping someone can answer. What do you guys tend to find to be the best compression method to use when generating a video? I usually take rendered out image sequences from Softimage and use a different program for making the video. When I do a QuickTime and use the Animation codec, it looks great (because it is lossless, I believe) but the file size gets quite high. When I try H264, it compresses great, but it seems lossy. Do you guys have a good setting for BitRate (min and max included) when using H264, or has anyone found a better compression/codec that keeps the quality looking great and the file size not too big.

The file size doesn't have to be super small, just not too big. Quality is much more important to me for this scenario.

Thank You in Advance for help.

[NNois]

try the apple prores 4:2:2 it's very good (only available on osx) or on windows you can try the Avid DnxHD in 4:2:2 too if you want more go with 4:4:4 ;-)

H264 codec are as you found out an end user codec only for viewing.

Both Apple and Avid codec are pretty good standards in the industry with 10bits encoding etc, plus the codec are quicktime based so available on nearly all the software.

Now if only we could have an OpenEXR like video codec, this would be very cool and solve a LOT of things

[Rez007]

Thanks for the info NNois, I will check into that and see how that works.