I'm old school. Been doing this since AE version 1. Old habits die hard and, before ProRes, it was the most accessible codec that supported alphas (not counting image sequences of course).

I do use ProRes quite a bit. Odd thing is, I swear that to my old eyes the Animation codec shows slightly less banding issues then ProRes 4444. At 100% quality Animation is lossless while ProRes is always lossy (although very good at it). And according to some quick internet research, Animation is supposed to support higher then 8 bits. In AE 5 it does let me select trillions of colors. I just checked. It may not be doing anything though.

At any rate, this is all academic. ProRes is the modern day codec of choice and the file size savings is huge. I have to FTP all my work.

Thanks for the insights.

mike

On May 26, 2012, at 12:35 pm, Jack Tunnicliffe wrote:

I haven't used the animation codec for years. I'm really surprised when I see so many people still are using this codec. You know that codec was created in 1990 or so and while it was great at the time and even handled an alpha channel, it is a 20 some year old codec. It is 8 bits so don't bother trying to render trillions of colors with it. ProRes 4444 is a wonderful codec and is a higher data rate than ProRes HQ and also provides a straight alpha.