Moho Forum

What is the best render setting for smooth, clear video? I'm trying to render NTSC 16:9 and trying to get the absolute best possible quality. I've tried full frames/lossless but the video is jerky. What is the next best thing to that? I want an uncompressed format so that I can output an AVI and input into Adobe Premiere, edit, then output to DVD.

Any suggestions?
risk

render on no compression or uncompressed.. you will end up with huge files..

if size is an issue use animation codec

those are the best we found..

Full frames on my system it really slow and jerky, so I guess that isn't an option. What is an animation codec and where can I find one?

Hello Risk,

You don't want uncompressed, you want lossless (uncompressed is also lossless, but there are other lossless codecs).

The Animation codec is a Quicktime codec (lossless at 100% quality, lossy at lower quality), not available (as far as I know) for AVI files. Quicktime supports a few lossless codecs if your video editor supports it - I don't use Adobe Premiere, does it support Quicktime?
If so, you might wish to consider using that format instead of AVI files.
PNG and TIFF (also TGA and BMP) should also be lossless Quicktime codecs.

If you are restricted to (or prefer) AVI files, do a Google search under "lossless codec video" or something similar to find several lossless codecs (both commercial and free) for the AVI format. HuffYUV is a well-known free lossless codec for AVI that also supports alpha channels (I've had trouble with the modified 2.2 version on some websites - look for the authentic 2.1 version).

Note: only use these lossless AVI codecs for intermediate editing steps, not final distribution - most people won't have these codecs installed on their computers to play them, and video files with lossless codecs are usually larger than the common distribution codecs (but smaller than completely uncompressed files). If you're outputting to DVD format, which uses MPEG-2 instead of AVI or Quicktime, you don't have to worry about final distribution codecs (MPEG-2, as I understand it, has various settings but no codecs).

Even if playback is jerky, completely uncompressed files should still edit in Premiere okay - you may just have to render (in Moho and/or Premiere) to another codec for previewing.

Regards, Myles.

hey myles..

why is uncompressed not good??
we have used uncompressed on adobe premier and it worked great.. except file size is huge.. from what we found out uncompressed was the best specially if we have to do more layering or effects..

if going with image sequence... the only good file format we found was .tga .. we did not like .png or .bmp

This might not be the right way to do it or there maybe other ways but this is just what we found and what worked for us...

Hey genieworx!

genieworx wrote:why is uncompressed not good??
we have used uncompressed on adobe premier and it worked great.. except file size is huge.. from what we found out uncompressed was the best specially if we have to do more layering or effects..

Uncompressed is great if you have the space and your system can handle it - and, as you say, it also preserves alpha channel transparency for layering and compositing.

Risk was saying that he(?) was having trouble with the uncompressed codec, with slow and jerky playback. One of the main reasons for using uncompressed is that, unlike many other codecs, it is completely lossless - it keeps exact colour for every pixel, where many codecs lose colour and detail to get smaller file sizes.

I was just saying there are other lossless codecs for AVI (and Quicktime), keeping every pixel intact, which offer smaller (compressed) files which may play back better on his system, without losing the lossless advantage of the uncompressed codec, and also take up less disk space. Some of these lossless codecs (such as HuffYUV) also support alpha channel transparency for layering and compositing.

There are no other "uncompressed" codecs (as far as I know) - there wouldn't be much point as they'd have the same functionality (and disk sizes, and loading speed requirements) as the standard "Full frames (uncompressed)" codec. So, when Risk wanted the same benefits as uncompressed (full quality, and possibly alpha channel transparency), but better playback, I was suggesting that those benefits are more the result of the lossless nature of the uncompressed code, not a result of the lack of compression, so other lossless codecs (which usually have some form of compression) might be worth trying.

Apart from Risk's playback problem (and the large files sizes), there is nothing wrong with uncompressed from my viewpoint.

genieworx wrote:if going with image sequence... the only good file format we found was .tga .. we did not like .png or .bmp

This might not be the right way to do it or there maybe other ways but this is just what we found and what worked for us...

Actually, when I spoke of PNG/TIFF/TGA/BMP, Quicktime actually offers these formats as a codec compression style in its animation container format - so you can actually have a single Quicktime .mov animation/movie file that is compressing its frames (losslessly) using the PNG/etc style compression, rather than a sequence of separate still image files.

With regard to image sequences - I have had good results with PNG image sequences where the software supports it (and PNGs are often smaller than the equivalent TGA). TGA is, however, an older format with a widely available and simpler format, so it has excellent and wide support (heck, I've even written TGA-handling code myself, several years ago). PNG is newer and more complicated, TIFF is both complicated and has too many variations and options, and BMP while simple doesn't support alpha channel transparency, so I agree, TGA is usually an excellent choice for image sequences.

Regards, Myles.

Im trying to get my 2 second animation onto DV stream. Does anyone have any specific AVI compression settings they use to get the best compression? Thanks...