Any way to not lose quality when rendering After Effects clips?

[zacholson1]

My dynamic link shots are much worse quality than my regular shots. Im pretty sure it's because the dynamic clips are being exported/compressed twice. Once from AE, and once when the final video is rendered. Is there any way around this? I edit complex music videos on a laptop with many dynamic links, and have to export each individual dynamic link shot as its own mp4, or else my GPU will crash while exporting.  

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

If you are exporting your comps for use as a source you need a DI or Production master that is rendered to a visually lossless frame-based format like GoPro Cineform, ProRez, or AVcHD. I always choose 10-bit or better formats for my Digital Intermediates. 

You should never use an MP4. MP4 files are MPEG compressed IPB calculated inter-frame compressed files where the color is compressed in blocks of at best 8 pixels and the best you can hope for is one I frame (real frame) for every P (predicted frame) and every B (bidirectionally predicted) frame. Even if you could use all I frame compression, there will still be compression and color artifacts that degrade the video and the best you can get is 8-bit color. 

[zacholson1]

Thank you very much!! I will give that a shot and report back if I have more questions.

🙂