What is the best video format for importing into After Effects CS5

[Guest]

Please look at this video, work in progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_wbdKALQk

The opening, featuring a ribbon of videos, was created in After Effects, using Digieffects Freeform.

The  issue is the poor quality of the videos that are featured in the  opening -- compared to the higher quality of videos from the original Premiere  project., which you can see at the end of the clip.

To create the After Effects project, I exported a series of video clips from Premiere  to mp4.

Then I imported them into AfterEffects.

The bottom line, and the purpose of this question, is I am thinking that  MP4 was not the best choice for the Adobe Premiere export.

What  is the best format to export video from in Premiere Pro CS5 to import  into after effects, or to import into any other editing program,  incuding importing right back into Adobe Premiere, if that is eever  needed.

AVI?

MOV

MP4

And any other settings that will result with the highest qualiity videos for importing.

Thanks

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

Why not just import the PPro project mMP4is not a good idea at all.

[Todd_Kopriva]

To follow on with Wade's suggestion...

There are lots of ways to get movies and projects and other things back and forth between After Effects and Premiere Pro. This page outlines them:

"Working with Premiere Pro and After Effects"

If you must render and export a movie out of one application to bring it into another, there is a very basic piece of video workflow advice that you need to keep in mind (which applies to _all_ video software, not just After Effects and Premiere Pro):

If you're creating a movie to be used in the next step of a post-production pipeline, you _never_ want to use a format that does lossy compression. You either use no compression or (preferable) lossless compression. Examples of codecs that provide lossless compression are the Animation codec and PNG codec at the highest quality settings; these can be used in a QuickTime container, for example. Never compress a movie with lossy compression except at the very end of your pipeline, when you're creating the final movie for distribution.

MP4 (MPEG-4) is a lossy codec. The quality loss is acceptable for the last stage in the pipeline, but it's not acceptable for an intermediate file.

It seems that you would benefit from reading this and and working your way through this.

[Todd_Kopriva]

Here's a link to the other forum where Rowby posted the identical question and got some answers:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3161317