Oops! I need to retract part of the above.
I had assumed you couldn't change codec settings in ASP because there's no direct command for it, but I just tried it out and, during the export process, a window does pop up that allows you to set a codec and adjust settings.
I still recommend outputting frames but if you prefer to output to a video format, you should choose a lossless codec or uncompressed video, unless maybe you're going directly to YouTube or a portable device.
For lossless, I like
Lagarith. It's a free codec and once installed, it appears in almost any program that outputs .avi. The catch with Lagarith is that it's incredibly processor intensive...it's meant more for archival usage and not for realtime playback, so it's really not practical for full HD playback and editing. What I like to do is render all my editorial footage to full res Lagarith, and then batch process the footage to half-res h264 into a proxy folder. VirtualDub works great for this--once you have a Process settings file setup, processing many clips can be very fast--it might take just a minute or two. (If anybody is interested, I can make a tutorial video about my workflow in the near future.)
Once I have the full res and proxy videos in separate folders (Full and Proxy), I copy the proxies to a folder called Edit. When I'm ready to edit the clips in my video editor (I use Vegas but any video editor will do,) I reference all my videos from the Edit folder. Because I'm using low res proxies, the playback is always smooth and interactive. When I'm ready to output my final video, I copy the Lagarith version of the clips to the Edit folder, overwriting the proxies. (Remember, the original proxy files are still available from the Proxy folder.) Since the filenames are identical, the video editor should now automatically reference the high res videos, ready for final rendering.
Sorry, that's probably way more info than you were asking for but once I get started...
G.
P.S., somebody will probably want to mention that Vegas can generate proxy videos internally. This is true but it doesn't do it automatically so you'll need to regenerate the proxies every time you update your animation, which can get messy and time consuming on larger projects. In my experience, the method described above is quicker and more reliable.
