Adobe After Effects

Rendering and Encoding

We’re going to jump ahead to the end and talk about how to save your videos as standalone files.

What’s the Difference?

The main way After Effects creates a video is through a process called rendering, in which After Effects writes each frame to the disk. Typically, this results in a large, high-quality file that is excellent for importing into Premiere, or archiving. The most common render format is a QuickTime file, writing in a codec called ProRes (a codec is a language that a computer uses to write a media file, and the QuickTime wrapper supports several different codecs).

When we talk about encoding, it’s a more complicated process that can look at the entire video file, and throw away data that isn’t necessary. Typically, ...