ProRes 422, Studio Artist Movies and Final Cut Pro
When outputting a movie from Studio Artist you can take advantage of the the ProRes 422 codecs if you have Final Cut Pro installed on the same machine as Studio Artist. Apple only allows this compression on Mac computers with FCP installed. If you do not have FCP then please see the below advice for Windows users wanting to use compression.
If you plan on using Studio Artist in FCP it makes sense to use the ProRes 422 codec when outputting movies from Studio Artist since that is optimal format for editing in FCP. Even if you are not going to import your SA creations into Final Cut you still may want to take advantage of using ProRes 422 to minimize your output file size with very little change to the original.
Windows users and those Mac users who do not have Final Cut Pro can use the pre-cursor to ProRes 422, Apple Intermediate Codec. For much smaller file sizes you can try the MPEG-4 Video or the JPEG – Photo compression types. You just need to experiment to see what works for you.
You can change codecs in SA by choosing
File > Movie Codec Settings
That will bring up a dialogue window where you can change the settings.
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If you are working with the ProRes codec and you want to output an embedded alpha channel, you need to make sure you use the ProRes 4444 codec. As of the writing of this comment, it’s the only ProRes codec that supports an embedded alpha channel. You can always do some google searching if you want to verify this at a later date.
Once you have selected the ProRes 4444 codec, you need to make sure you select the millions of colors+ option. If it’s set to just millions of colors (without the +), then it will not contain an embedded alpha channel.