Good compromised codec with alpha channel

[elmuz]

Hi all,
we are working on HDV Premiere Project. We need to export subtitles layers as a separate video (with alpha). As a video content is very simple, all black apart from the lower part with subtitles... you can see the attachment...
Even from a temporal point of view, is simple as well, every title is online for at least 2 seconds... so I need something will take advantage from that... I think H.264 could be a choice... This video with only subs inside will be used in other Premiere projects so we need something Premiere can handle quite easy without the need of gigabytes...
Clear enough?

[jman98]

I don't work with Premiere so I cannot answer your questions, but I'm sure that you should not have said "compromised" in your subject title. I realize that English is not your first language, but this word means "unable to function optimally" and I'm sure that is not what you want to say. I don't speak Italian, so sorry but I can only explain this is English.

Maybe you meant to say "compressed".

[elmuz]

I'm quite sure I wanted to say that ^^... And you're right, my English is not so good...
... I wanted codec spec, which are a good compromise between Quality/GBytes/Easy-to-Handle in Premiere...
I need alpha channel, and something which take advantage from spatial (you see a lot of black area) and temporal (subs stays for around 2 seconds) redundance...

EDIT: I thought compromise is also used with the meaning of "balance", right?

[poisondeathray]

You can nest projects . e.g. delete everything except your subtitles layer , save project . This will only take a few kb, but it references the original assets (unless they were made by titler) - so if you pass it to other projects, you need the original assets referenced as well (if you made layers in photoshop for example)

When inserting into a new project, that old project file will look like a layer

Try this out on a small project first (on older versions of premiere - it looks like you're using an older version - it can crash on large projects)




Other options: huffyuv rgba , ut video codec rgba, qt animation codec - all these are large in filesize because they are lossless. But they are more reliable than nesting projects

vp6a/flv is another option (compressed), but difficult to edit (bad choice for editing format).

[elmuz]

I'd say QT Animation is best option (considering filesize)... Unfortunately you can set alpha channel in QT-Anim only on PPro CS4 and above... For this occasion I used MOV-Tiff, next time I'll move on a workstation with CS5...

I avoided exporting the just the project cause I had several problem doing this in the past. From PPro 2.0 to CS4/5 you lose title properties (as font/size and other attributes).

Cheers

[poisondeathray]

you should be able to use png+alpha in mov , it would be smaller than tiff/mov

[jman98]

EDIT: I thought compromise is also used with the meaning of "balance", right?

This is true, but "compromised" and "compromise" are not the same word and you said "compromised" which means bad things. If you had said "compromise" that would probably have been OK.