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Great to see the revised export option for Mac in the new version, but I am unclear how to use it. When I choose .mov I now get the choice of Lossless or Compressed, but nothing comes up which gives me any choice of setting. How compressed, or what coded to use. How do I get those options?

David_Fine wrote:Great to see the revised export option for Mac in the new version, but I am unclear how to use it. When I choose .mov I now get the choice of Lossless or Compressed, but nothing comes up which gives me any choice of setting. How compressed, or what coded to use. How do I get those options?

11.0.3 Export - MOV (FFmpeg) - only two options:

Lossless = Apple Animation compression codec (no compression)

Compressed = MPEG-4 compression codec

If you need more options , export to Lossless (Apple Animation) or Lossless .AVI (RGB mode) , then use Quicktime 7 Pro or HandBrake to re-encode the file using a different codec such as H.264 or Apple ProRes, whatever may be the desired encoding.

I'm not so expert in export. So if I export .mov lossless is there any reason I would need to convert it, or is that the perfect output codec for final work? If I do convert it, as it's lossless, I trust converting does not lose any quality. Also, when I export the .mov lossless, I wonder why Quicktime needs to convert it to open it and then it asks you to save the conversion, which is a bigger file size than the one that was exported. I'm confused.

David_Fine wrote:I'm not so expert in export. So if I export .mov lossless is there any reason I would need to convert it, or is that the perfect output codec for final work? If I do convert it, as it's lossless, I trust converting does not lose any quality. Also, when I export the .mov lossless, I wonder why Quicktime needs to convert it to open it and then it asks you to save the conversion, which is a bigger file size than the one that was exported. I'm confused.

Only reason to convert the Lossless (Apple Animation) .mov file is because it is VERY LARGE ... so if you wanted to email it to someone or embed it on a website or something like that , better to convert it to a lighter codec like H.264 .

when I export the .mov lossless, I wonder why Quicktime needs to convert it to open it

Hmmmmm ... I'm not sure what you mean by that ... when I export to Lossless .MOV (Apple Animation codec) it opens in Quicktime without needing to convert it. Ah ... hold on ... I'm using good ol' Quicktime 7 Pro ... but yeah, ok now I see what you mean ... if I open it in Quicktime Player X it does do some sort of "converting file" thing before it opens . I don't know what that is all about . I almost never use Quicktime Player X.

Right, so is the output lossless perfect for finished work? That is, is there any reason to change it to something else in terms of output quality and not to reduce the file size? And thanks for your lightening quick help!!

David_Fine wrote:Right, so is the output lossless perfect for finished work? That is, is there any reason to change it to something else in terms of output quality and not to reduce the file size? And thanks for your lightening quick help!!

If you've got the storage space there's no reason to re-encode and reduce the Lossless .MOV file .

Since Apple has been gradually killing off Quicktime I've started using TVPaint's internal .AVI export more often. The .AVI files exported from TVPaint seem to play equally well on both Windows and Mac computers . For a lighter file use the Motion-JPEG mode . For lossless use the RGB mode . If for some reason the file needs to be converted to a .MOV or .MP4 then open it in Quicktime 7 Pro or Handbrake to convert it to .MOV.

Quicktime X converting movies before playing is because they dropped support of several codecs, namely PNG and Unvompressed 4:2:2 which I use a lot. But it's tricky: on the same machine, I can export in these two codecs from old software, but not from new software. QT will convert movies into ProRes 444 before playing and save them in this format if I want to. New Version 11 of AnimeStudio can import QT files with PNG codec, but needs a lot of time for that because the conversion is done in the background for each file.