Information overload time!
In my experience, when I'm rendering for
compositing, it's always better to render to image sequence. There are many advantages to this over rendering to a movie file:
1. Rendering to a movie file is more memory and processor-intensive, meaning for a very heavy Moho project, rendering can be slower and more prone to crashing. (This is actually true for any animation program.) A beefy modern computer should be fine, but a lower-end computer might struggle with very heavy projects rendered at FHD or higher.
2. If the render does crash, it's easier to pick up where the render left off when rendering to an image sequence. When rendering to a movie file, this generally means you need to start over...or render to multiple movie files, which defeats the purpose of rendering to a movie file.
3. Retakes can be faster to render with an image sequence because you only need to re-render the frames that changed, not the entire thing.
4. In compositing, you have greater flexibility working with image sequence files, certainly when applying advanced techniques.
5. Tip: If you
really need to render a movie file directly out from a
heavy Moho project, you can render to image sequence first, load the images in a second oho Mproject, and then render the movie file. This approach can be less taxing for the computer. It's probably not necessary most of the time (Moho is actually pretty efficient in rendering,) but it's something you can do when you have trouble.
In my 25+ years of working at different animation and VFX production studios, this is how we always worked, generally for all the reasons listed above. Rendering to a movie file is typically done at the end of the compositing stage for the video editor, and then the video editor renders the final version as a movie file for distribution (broadcast, streaming, YouTube, etc.)
Regarding TGA vs PNG, I prefer PNG because the file size is significantly smaller (as Mike mentioned.) Another major advantage of PNG is that it's capable of higher bit depth than PNG (i.e., trillions of colors,) but this doesn't apply to Moho because Moho is limited to 24-bit color (millions of colors.) You'll see the difference when rendering gradients across wide areas, like skies; the lower-end rendering typically results in banding.
Also, TGA is a very old standard, and I'm not sure anybody really uses is anymore. I personally haven't used TGA since the very early 2000s.
Regarding HUFFYUV (and other movie codecs/formats,) HUFFY is another old standard. About 12 years ago, I switched to Lagarith, which was more capable and a bit more efficient for editing. (This is what I used back when I made
Scareplane with Anime Studio Pro 9.) Several years ago, I switched again to MagicYUV, which has even more features than Lagarith and, unlike the other two, is still in development. By today's standard, though, none of these are great for editing or archival use because they require installing a third-party codec and may not be compatible with some modern programs. (Of the three, MagicYUV is probably the most compatible because it's supported in AVI or MOV containers.)
In the last couple of years, I switched to using ProRes because all of the programs I use on the Windows platform now support it. With more recent versions of After Effects, I use the Media Encoder option to render to ProRes 422 Standard for editorial and ProRes 444 if I need an alpha channel in an editorial (typically for chyrons and titles I plan to overlay in editing.) For my final output (my YouTube channel,) I render to ProRes 422 Standard.
Warning: ProRes files are not small, but they can withstand a high number of re-encoding passes. Also, note that 422 is
visually lossless. For human eyeballs, this is good enough. ProRes 444 is lossless, but the file size is too large and impractical for my personal use. When even 422 is too big for my use, I'll fall back to HEVC (h.265,) .mp4 for final distribution. The file size is significantly smaller, it has greater color depth and accuracy than h.264, and this format can withstand at least one pass of re-encoding before degrading, which is what happens when you upload a file to a streaming service like YouTube or Vimeo.
Hope this helps.
