Hi all, so I'm working on a movie that requires being rendered in chunks and then some final post-processing in a video editor at the end.  Should I be doing all my renders to AVI so that it only gets compressed once at the end?  Or is the compression penalty small enough these days that I can just render to MP4 along the way, even if it may get re-compressed at the end by the video editor?  I don't notice any difference in speed rendering to AVI, but wow does it eat disk space!

Thanks,
Ian

This is an opinion thing, but I use .mp4's for everything.

I render at 3840 x 2160 most of the time, but YouTube compression scales it down.
For example, I uploaded a 6 gig movie, and got back a 100 meg file when I clicked download.


Creator of the free website:
PixelDatabase.Net
A Free Online Text Based Image Editor

I use PNG sequences. The total space is smaller than AVIs, but there is also no quality loss. MP4s are OK for tests, but I don't use them for anything serious.

The big advantage of PNG sequences is also that you can redo part of a render instead of having to redo the whole thing.

The disadvantage is that you have to do your audio separate, but you would do that anyway for quality reasons and flexibility.

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For my web mini-series I plan to do it all as png series, like Animagic, but export at 1920x1080, assemble in DaVinci Resolve and scale it up to 4k there for export. That's waaay faster than trying to render it in 4k for me, in my tests, but you have to have DaVinci Studio (actually why I forked out for the Studio version) to do it.

So some of it might depend on what video editor you're using--I don't use Premiere Pro anymore, for example, but I'd imagine new versions could do that, too. I do all tests renders as MP4 or MOV, and haven't actually posted anything with the above process, because so far, everything is a test Everything I have on YouTube so far went up as 1920x1080 MP4 or .MOV. It's tolerable quality but not fantastic.

If you happen to be a Resolve Studio user, I posted this video a while back on exact settings that get you 4k with very little quality loss on YouTube: https://forum.reallusion.com/481565/Helpful-Export-Settings-for-DaVinci-Resolve-17-Studio-Users-for-Getting-Good-4k-on-YouTube

Another huge benefit of the png series is being able render transparent backgrounds for compositing, BTW. Which I'm starting to need to do with big scenes. And doing that, but like DataJuggler in 4k, might be just the perfect midpoint for what you're doing. 

Lastly, I'm buying several external drives, and they will be (sigh) velcro'd to my beautiful new laptop's monitor as soon as I can bring myself to do it, because I filled two terabytes with just assets and scene files, not final anything, as soon as I installed everything. I might be a bit of a digital hoarder, ahem. But yeah, animation and disk space are an inverse ratio. 
:-)




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I do two passes -- a PNG sequence at the correct frame rate, and an MP4 with sound.  I put both into After Effects and match up the PNG sequence with the mp4 (i.e. sync up the sound to picture), and either do a final render or further post.  This system seems a bit cumbersome, but it lets me chose a frame rate for the PNG, and access to transparency if I need it.  I also render at a lower contrast so I can make finer adjustments in post.

You should always be doing your post in some kind of post-production or editing software, and your final sound mix in some kind of software made for that purpose.  The ability to tweak your colour timing, throw over some additional effects, and clean up your sound is worth the extra trouble.

Good luck!

--Bex.