After Effects highest compression

[Jeremy_Sawatzky]

hey guys, i am working on a gig involving shooting a series of guitar lessons. These lessons are going to be web based for the first part then move to dvd later on. I have 5 lessons i have completed, first in premier to line up audio and get the 3 inputs onto one screen then into after effects to do the greenscreen work. The tutorials are 10 min in lenghth, 1280 by 720 res. not a whole lot of movement. very simple stuff. What is my best option for compression coming out of after effects using the render que. As i said the files are 10 min in length and need to be under 1 gb in size. i could spend hours testing and testing but it would be faster to just hear from u guys.

mods if this is in the wrong place, plz move it to the right place. thanks

 

[jhodges]

I would suggest H.264 as it is simply very well supported and as most of the web seems to find it just fine, you should be good too. The other thing that works pretty well for rather stable and simple footage is mpeg-4.

 

[jhodges]

I would export at like JPEG-2000 and send it back into Premiere first though. I like the NLE control that Premiere has much more for editing than After Effects.

 

[Charles Angus]

If you are on Mac, I would recommend exporting the file's at their native resolution, and then use Quicktime's iPod preset. It looks good, and is an ok filesize.

Exporting from AE in a higher quality format allows you to use those files as your new master, so you don't have to re-render the After Effects project again (which would be slower than just converting the footage).

 

[Chris Kennedy]

I'd export it out of After Effects at an animation/pro res. Then bring it back in your NLE and export it out as a MP4 with H264 compression. I don't see on my CS4 of After Effects if you could do it.

This will give you extremely small file sizes with pretty good quality. For example, a short I directed was 26 min approx. I used that compression ^ and at 720p the entire film was a little over 500 MB.

You might want to test it out several times until you get the quality you want. For 720p, i will never set the bit rate under 2,000 kb/s.

 

[Eren Ozkural]

Test quite a few times, theres an art to compression as well as a science it seems...
If you're forced to stick to the AE render queu then H.264 would be your best bet. But since you seem to have premiere as well, skip the intermediate rendering process and import the AE sequences into Premiere with Dynamic Link or just use Adobe Media Encoder.

 

[Jeremy_Sawatzky]

thanks for all the responses, il definity try these options