I’m learning Notch right now and I’m blown away by how powerful and flexible it is. I’m going to produce videos for clients very soon.
One thing that worries me is that it’s easy to generate very complex and jaw dropping animations, but then after you upload it to Vimeo or Youtube, the compression on their end destroys most of the detail.
I always upload in ProRes to minimise artifacts on my end, and let YouTube/Vimeo handle the compression on their end. Upload times are longer but it always results in the best end quality.
What should we avoid in Notch scenes to ensure the least compression artifacts when our hard work is online ?
I would suggest to export as a image sequence and then compile the video in After effects. I havent had much success with exporting videos straight from notch at highest quality. I have found that exporting a image sequence works the best.
Seems like with the PLE edition it’s just not possible to make a nice looking render.
At least ; I hope that’s the problem
With PLE you are limited to a quite low render resolution (720p). Pro is unlimited.
One of the side benefits of a real-time renderer is you don’t have to be concerned with such things as compression artefacts… until you have to bake to video. It’s easy to add a ton of noise, gradients with banding (=glow) etc that either destroy compression ratios or compress badly. Finding the right settings for that definitely takes time.
As Berto said, you’re probably best off rendering from Notch to a lossless format, then converting to H264 or ProRes 4:2:2 using another tool. Image Sequence (PNG) is lossless; internally, some of the guys are using MagicYUV, which is fast and gives great lossless results; and we also have support for Animation (RLE) out of our Quicktime GPU renderer now in the new Beta.
-Matt