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Let's consider my workflow before I ask my question. I'm using the After Effects CC 2014.0 release.
So now, considering this workflow, there are several very important things to consider, especially since I'm mostly an amateur and I'm compressing the video twice.
Please be as detailed with your answers as you can possibly be and be sure to address all six questions (if you can answer them). I've done lots of research up to this point, but I still find it very difficult to know exactly what's happening to the color when it's going through these various compression codecs and any information I can find about color depth always seems to be limited to still images rather than video. Also, please do not ask why I'm not using Adobe Media Encoder; rendering out of After Effects directly is about ten times faster, and simply converting a two-minute clip to MP4 in Premiere only takes three minutes.
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You are overthinking this. H.264/ MP4 is ever only 8bit, so there is no option to choose anything else. MPEG-Levels have a completely different meaning and you can easily look this up on Wikipedia. Millions of colors equate to 8bit as well, and AVCIntra is just another MPEG derivative, anyway (though there are more modern 10bit and 12bit variations). Similarly, regardless of this, a CoDec can't render what is not there - even if they supported 16bit or some such thing, if your AE is set to 8bit that is all you ever get. Of course some CoDecs have redundant settings for bit-depth, but this only inflates the color values to 16bit (in technical terms) without bringing any extra visible fidelity back. Preserve RGB only makes sense if you use color management. If you don't use any, it should not have any influence, though occasionally source files with color profiles embedded can whack out, because AE then thinks it needs to do some color management even none exists.
Mylenium
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So I upload this MP4 file directly to YouTube but also provide viewers with a direct download link so that they can obtain the MP4 file directly (so that the version they obtain hasn't been compressed by YouTube).
This is a myth. YouTube will always transcode... sorry...
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Hi JohnT,
Are all your questions covered here by our experts? Please let us know what more you need to know.
Thanks,
Kevin