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PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 3:54 pm
by Jkoseattle
My project uses almost exclusively external images. Lots and lots of them. By default I get JPGs and just go ahead and use them as-is. But often I need to carve pieces out of them and make parts transparent, so those I save as PNGs. So my project has lots of JPGs and lots of PNGs, depending on whether I use the image exactly as I get it or whether I need to alter it and have transparent bits. And there are a lot of them, so a single project might have over 100 of these images. Near the end of the building process, Moho gets very sluggish. (I know I know, split it into smaller movies. Sometimes that's impractical for other reasons.)

So it occurs to me that maybe Moho would be happier if all these images were PNGs? There's no reason I can't save those unaltered JPGs as PNGs instead, so that the whole project has only PNGs in it. Would that make any difference, do you think?

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 4:03 pm
by chucky
PNG all the way

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 5:40 pm
by synthsin75
Probably won't help performance, but jpg is compressed while png is lossless. So png will preserve better image quality.

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 6:14 pm
by slowtiger
If you're on Mac, PNG seem to slow down the system a bit. Not Moho itself, but first time loading and opening takes some time.

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 7:12 pm
by chucky
Mac no like png? Didn't know that, yikes and yeeesh. :?

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 9:38 pm
by Greenlaw
The only time I use JPG is for a visual reference, like an animatic or tracing image. This is because JPG streams more efficiently across a network.

However, if the image/sequence is meant to be part of the final render, it's PNG all the way. This is because PNG is a lossless format and JPG is a lossy format. With JPG, the images will degrade when you re-render them, and they will probably degrade quite noticeably by the time they've been rendered again in compositing and/or editing, and when they're compressed again by a streaming service like YouTube or Vimeo.

Also, if you need transparency in the layers, PNG supports transparency but JPG does not.

PNG might possibly take a little longer to load because the file size can be larger but once the images are loaded in memory, they shouldn't be slower than any other image layer format in Moho. If PNG is slower on the Mac version of Moho, this should be reported to the developers because it really shouldn't be slower.

Re: PNG vs JPG

Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2019 5:18 pm
by Jkoseattle
Thanks all! I can use PNG all the way then, if there's no performance difference.