I’m looking for the best codec to use for the original video output from Blender, that is, one that doesn’t leave visible artifacts like Divx 5.2. The output will be post-processed. I don’t care about speed; disk space is of major concern. Maybe a lossless codec would be ideal. Has anyone used the Alparysoft Lossless Codec? For me, it messes up colors in lossless mode.
I’ve tried Huffyuv - different problem, but still a show-stopper there.
any video app worth its salt [so to speak?] can load a sequence of images just fine. Use tga, or png [losless formats] if your app supports them. iirc tga would be supported better than png.
also, when using sequenced images you don’t have to worry about the 2Gb file size limit on fat32 file systems, or the avi limit of 2Gb files [some apps support larger, but the spec doesn’t require it and they usually don’t say that they do. I don’t think blender will create a larger than 2Gb avi, but I haven’t tried so I don’t know what it will do]
there is no best codec. it all depends on what you wanna do. for post-production i’d go for image sequences or a DV codec with high quality settings. this also depends on the editor you’re using.
Seeing how Space is an issue, I’ve found that Indeo is a GREAT codec. It is not lossless, but set it at 100% and you get a 45 second file that is about 8MB, and losses very little video quality. It is very versatile and very fast too. For anything that needs to be very good, but not great, I use Indeo. I’m hoping Blender will incorporate DV Native Codecs is one of their next few releases. Not that that would help you all that much since space is a problem, though they really aren’t all that big for being completely lossless.
Thanks for all the comments. It’s a learning process, and your ideas help. AVI Raw (lossless) for 22 seconds of video works for now. I’ll keep exploring.
