Open EXR

Back in school, I was taught to render with targa which is the best quality for 3d animation. When you render in passes, shadow, specular etc, you're going to have a lot of targe images in your folders which is how it works; a whole lot of images that can be a mess to deal with.

Instead of targa, i am starting to use open EXR instead. The wonders of exr is that all of your passes are put inside this one exr file which is amazing. To extract the passes, you simply make use of exractor from the 3d channel in after effects.

One more cool thing for exr is the z-depth. It allows you to freely adjust the depth in AE. I find it troublesome to get the depth right in maya. I am sure there are other cool stuffs about exr that i haven't know yet.