What is best for rendering TGA JPEG TIFF?
 

Hey guys!

What is the best (or standard) image format to render to instead of making avis in maya 5 that have the best quality... JPEG TARGA or TIFF etc...?

I'm always rendering TARGA file but they are huge!

Thanks in advance

I don't know if there is a "best" format, it's probably a matter of opinion. but I personaly prefer tiff (I always render in tiff). Because it has lossless compression (so in other words I get perfect quality like with say a bmp, but I don't get a huge file, tipicaly they end up smaller than a psd (photoshop file)); also because it's supported by every program that I've seen; and it even suports layers and masks (alpha channel).

After I have the tiff then I use photoshop or fcheck to change it to whatever I need (jpg if I want to post it on the web, psd if I did something to it in photoshop, bmp if I want to use it again in maya as a texture or something, etc...)

yeah, tiff and tga seem to be the majority. I'm a tga man myself. ;)

Cool I mostly use it for after effects compositing....
I guess I will compare tiff and targa I mainly dont want to loose quality...

and keep the file little as posible.

Thanks guys!!!

I once had the same problem having to chose a format. That's when I compared tga and tiff. I don't really know which one is "technicaly" better compress or anything, but when I was experiencing with them I found that tga gave me some trouble with the alpha channel, using it with photoshop, and the quality seemed better with tiff than with tga. I think the size was also smaller as tiff when I didn't had layers.

cool... thanks for replying!!! i will play with them and post any new info...

Both TGA and TIFF are lossless, that is they should look identical in quality unless something is wrong. TGA alpha support was broken in Photoshop 7, but was later fixed in a patch. Use whatever works for you, both will result in fairly large images. TIFF supports LZW, ZIP and JPG compression (with LZW and ZIP being lossless and JPG being lossy).

Test sizes:
Original image 1536x2048 pixels.

TGA uncompressed: 9mb
TIFF uncompressed: 9.01mb

TGA RLE compressed: 8.16mb
TIFF LZW compressed: 4.13mb
TIFF ZIP compressed: 3.97mb

So obviously TIFF creates smaller images, but your milage may vary depending on image content. TGA is also ALOT faster to store, requiring almost no CPU time for the compression. LZW is slower, and ZIP is the slowest. You'll have to weight the pro's and the con's.

Cheers.

Fred:

Thanks for the great info!!!

I'm playing with this and I think TGA will work better for me since like you say when it comes to store is faster and i need more of that instead of saving disk space since im trying to cut down time.

I'm kinda shifted from space (you can always get a new HHD) vs Speed (can't get a new CPU) ;)

again thanks for the Info!!! guys

What about png? Isn't it similar to TGA? I use png on my images. What are the cons of that one?

There are none, as PNG's are lossless. However in production, I would suggest EXR's.

PNG may not lose quality, but what about size? Is it smaller, bigger, equal to TGA or TIFF? The PNGs are quite big in size, as the rendering of my solar system has proven, but I didn't bother to check TGA size. All i know is that TGA was giving me transparent bg problems, as AAE was putting a fake background, so I needed to switch to PNG.

i believe the best image quality format is TIFF, besides you can use tiff converter to other image formats as well. maybe you can give this format a try.

exr....

Jay

Man I thought this thread was new, and I thought Mike was back on the boards also, until I noticed when the thread created....almost ten years ago.

Has anyone heard from Mike lately?