Tips for creating high-quality videos

There are a few things worth knowing when exporting animations, especially when you want to export the animation to create high-quality videos. Listed below are some good practices and recommendations that you should follow when exporting animations as videos.

General recommendations for improving the quality of videos

Recommendations for choosing a codec when exporting a video

Compressors/Decompressors (codecs) are third-party software, which greatly reduce file size while maintaining optimum quality. There are usually different codecs on different machines, depending on the types and versions of video creation, editing, and viewing software installed. All codecs supported by Microsoft's AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) or Apple's QT (QuickTime) that are available on a machine are available when exporting animations. They are listed on the respective Compression Settings dialog boxes. The Compression Settings dialog boxes are standard AVI and QT dialog boxes. Information about the codecs and their features is readily available on the Web or included with the software with which the codec was loaded onto a specific machine.

All the available codecs are provided when exporting, but it is entirely your decision to choose the codec that works best for you. The results of codecs are relative in terms of output video quality. Also, if you intend to send the output video to a client, you need to make sure that they have the same codec to decompress and view the file. You may find that a certain codec works well on one machine but doesn't work well on another. To understand which codec gives better results, export a video with a smaller duration set and test which one works best for you. However, from the standard list of codecs for AVI and QT, the following codecs have been used with success and may work well for you:

Controlling the file size of the exported video

The file size of the exported video depends mainly on the desired resolution (width x height) of the output video, frame rate of the video, and the compression applied.


Published 6/7/2010