So earlier this month I was having a lot of problems with an animation I did in After Effects rendering out without any errors, but the .Mov file created was lagging on most computers. The entire clip was there, and everything looked great, but I couldn't figure out how to get these videos to play smoothly without sacrificing the crisp quality.
I've rendered this piece out probably at least 30 times, and I was doing everything I normally did. Either Quicktime, or H.264, both of which are pretty standard for video in After Effects.
H.264 created the quality issues and pixelated a lot of my footage, but Quicktime was the format that was lagging.
After checking every single box I could possibly check, I found a drop down menu under "Format Options," after you selected Quicktime as your format.
This dropdown menu was set on "Animation" which is what mine piece was, however, I realized after the fact, that the Animation setting doesn't really compress your file! So it ended up being huge!
This was all easily solved by changing from "Animation" to "Apple Pro Res" which is another standard compressing format for Apple devices.
Sent my piece to render, and everything played great!
So if you ever have trouble in After Effects, or have a video-file that you know is all there, but your computer can't seem to play it. Try sending it through After Effects under an Apple Pro Res format, while still set as a Quicktime file! Should work wonders!
Thanks for your post Tyler. It can definitely be annoying that Macs just default to the "Animation" codec just because it is the first on the alphabetical list. I think your strategy of exporting Apple ProRes in a Quicktime container is a good one. I often do that to have a high-quality "Master" file. But I wanted to note that this file will not play on computers that don't have the ProRes codec installed. ProRes is a proprietary format that is on all our Macs in the center because it comes with Final Cut Studio. In order to make sure, the file plays on other computers it would have to be converted to a more universal codec like h.264. You can use Adobe Media Encoder or MPEG Streamclip to accomplish this task.
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