IFF or TARGA Compositing in After Effects?

[Anonymous]

I am working on a lighthouse scene in Maya with a camera movement and paint effects. I was wondering what the best file format to export the image sequence would be, IFF or TARGA?

If I use IFF is there a depth pass automatically stringed to it? As for TARGA do I have to render out a seperate depth pass?

I guess my question is which is the better file format to use and for what purpose. As well, I had rendered my ambient occlusion and depth pass in IFF and my paint effects in TARGA, would this cause an issue when compositing in After Effects?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks CG kidz,

April

[claudio antonelli]

It’s largely the same. Targas are limited to 8 bits per channel and in Adobe software are confusingly noted as being 16, 24 or 32 bits, but that’s across ALL channels and not per.

IFF is maya’s proprietary format, and while it’s nice they carry a depth channel internally, that’s not particularly special or useful. Open EXR’s can do that as well, and it’s not a big issue for most any software to read an external depth channel. Just make a new render layer and set it to the depth channel preset.

I like Tiffs for most things. They can be 8,16 or 32 bit, they can have lossless compression and most every piece of image reading software doesn’t require extra plug-ins to read them.

AE (or nuke, or combustion, or shake or flame or fusion) will be fine with mixing formats, so no worries there.

[Author]

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