If you are trying to sift through all of your render options and find that you are confused by all of the settings, then I would like share with you my work-flow and hopefully it will help stop the confusion. First and foremost you need to decide the delivery vehicle for your program, is it going straight to the web, are you publishing a DVD or simply exporting to another application. My philosophy is to always keep my exports at the highest quality at all times. So to do this I have found that a
QuickTime movie set to Animation is the best uncompressed export setting. There are a few key reasons that I have come to use this for my exports. It will always embed a clean alpha channel that is easily recognized by most applications, it does not compress your sequence and even if I am making a DVD I still render to this setting and I then allow
Adobe Encore or
Sorenson Squeeze hand the transcoding. This is not only efficient but most authoring programs handle the transcoding much better then After Effects or Avid. If you want to make animated gif for the web After Effects allows you do this and I use this setting if I am posting something to the web that is not needed for any other application. The last setting I use is .FLV.
Flash Videos are the best way to post your work on the Internet. Not only do they play fast but they look great. The settings for your .flv will change from project to project so you will need to play with your settings to achieve the results you are looking for. Just remember that
QuickTime set to Animation;
Flash Video and Animated GIF’s will get the results you are looking for in most applications.
