JPG or PNG sequence for speed in After Effects

[Liambm]

Hi all,

Just wanted to ask what the best format was for image sequences in After effects. I'm not too fussed about quality (as long as it doesn't look too compressed). I'm mainly focused on speeding up my projects.

Alternatively, is it faster to render the sequence as a ProRes file instead and use that? This might be a bit of a pain as it would mean rendering an image sequence in 3ds max and then converting each render to a MOV ProRes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated 👍

Liam

[Mylenium]

Clip files will cause much more cacheing due to their dependencies across multiple frames and AE having to decode them over and over, so that isn't much of an option when it comes to "pure" speed. You add an extra layer of file IO on top of streaming the clips and AE's regular caching for processed frames. The rest pretty much doesn't matter. I'm sure one could concoct a test scenario with e.g. 10000 frame sequence and measure all sorts of speed, but in the end you'll end up seeing only minor differences and that is true for most formats, including TIFFs and PSDs. We live in a day and age where the speed of your storage far exceeds what you need for most formats, so the real bottleneck becomes the decoding like with layered EXRs. Most "flat" formats will just zap through, however...

Mylenium

[Kyle Hamrick]

The conventional wisdom has always been to avoid compressed formats like PNG, as AE will then have to uncompress those frames to work with them. 

Do you have any other factors, like bit depth, as part of this consideration? EXR is my go-to.