Hello to all.

When saving an animation to image sequence I would like some advice as to which is the best format to save to,
image quality bmp.tiff,png

pete

No difference in image quality as they're all lossless formats. Go with whatever your vid editor/encoder supports.

Thanks for that ,have a good one
pete

Just my $.02 -

.bmp cannot be compressed.
.tiff is the best technically, but those can get enormous, and you have to be careful about compression sometimes.

I usually stick with .png because it has the right balance of excellent fidelity, smaller size, and the ability to do lossless compression on the files.

OK that answers another question as to why I was haveing trouble with compesssion:)
So png will give me good colour fidelity and Ill be able to create a varity of copies in various formats is Avi,wmv,mpeg 4.xvid etc.

thanks a lot for that addition.

pete

**Penguinisto

Hi again
,Actually I have compressed a animation from image sequence made up bmp and it works fine,
Tried to use png and tiff and loose the background
I must be missing somthing here:)

pete**

or you can use jpg; lossy (not everything gets copied), but if you are dealing with long animations, the total size will be less...

Hello
So is bmp ok and I wont be presented with problems later on?

pete

bmp is fine. It won't make any difference after you have made it into AVI. When making AVI, the codec you use determines the quality, compression, file size, etc...

Great ,thanks Guys.

The render can continue:)

Pete

Quote - **
Tried to use png and tiff and loose the background
I must be missing somthing here:)**

The alpha channel is what keeps getting included (then ignored). You have to not bother saving it, IIRC (been so long since I had to mess with that setting, I may be wrong, but it's one way or the other that causes transparenting on the background).

Also, animations are different from stills, so in an animation, save it however you like - the codec/format (AVI?) you convert them to will discard all that and come up with its own anyway :)

er, once you create an avi file from your image sequence the compression rate, fidelity all depend on what codec and settings you use.   Bmp, tiff, png all simply give the best starting quality and leaves you only 1 level of compression loss.

 Just A little info....

".BMP" -  lossless, uncompressed and does NOT have an alpha channel.  2bit to 8bit color  (older image format - VERY compatible)

".PNG" - lossless compression, Alpha channel, 2bit to 16bit color.   

"TIFF" - lossless compressed or uncompressed, Alpha channel, 2bit to 16bit color  ( think there may also be a 32bit version) plus  TIFF contains "metadata" that a  printer can use to fine tune the output of printed material.  (TIFF,  PSD and PDF are the prefered formats of your local printing house)

".JPG"  lossy compressed, no Alpha channel, 8bit only.  Good for internet,   not to be used for production purposes.

take care