Best format to export to in blender

Question

I am using blender video sequence editor feature. When I export my video I have subtle quality loss. There are mild flickering artifacts. I have a couple question related to that.

First one, is what is the best format to export to?

It has two places to set formats, which I am not sure the difference.

Under output I can set a tab described as "File format to save rendered images as"

There under video format that allow sound I can select h264, mpeg, ogg theora, and xvid.

Then I have an encoding tab that has a format option described "Output file format" where I can set

flash, matroska, ogg, xvid, h264, dv, quicktime, avi, mpeg4 mpeg2 mpeg1.

Which one of these is best for quality?

Answer 1

The first problem you have to solve is whether the flickering you see is part of your animation or part of the video encoder. If you have bad normals in your faces, you'll see a flicker. ProRes 422HQ produces a video file that's both low enough of a bitrate that most modern (post 2008) hardware can play without dropping frames, as well as high enough of a bitrate that you will not see any compression artifacts. If you still see flickering, the problem is with your model, not your video encoder. If you see no flickering, then start wandering through the settings of whatever video encoding format you are most likely to use for final product. If the video's final resting place will be YouTube, that would be H.264. If it's your laptop or desktop computer, it might be ProRes (Mac) or AVI (Windows) or Ogg (Linux).