Im now going to go trough all my timelapses and render them again in 4k and with all the new tricks i have learnt the latest years. Will be using After Effects on Windows 10. But one thing I havent found out yet is how I should save these renders. I want to have them in high quality but try to keep the filesize down, and I want those clips to be good to just throw into premiere and edit later.

I just rendered a 40D timelapse made of 622 raw files into a 25fps 4k clip. Total size of all files: 6,59 GB
Rendered that into a qt 8bit uncompressed file and its about 8GB. Its a 21 second long clip. Thats uncompressed ofcourse, but Im thinking there must be a way to encode it to maybe around a gb or so with decent enough quality so i dont want to go back later and do a re-render because i found out a better way of solving this.

I can render it in h264 with high bitrate and file is about 3-400 mb, and the clip looks really good, but Im not sure how it will all be in the future when editing things together. Would that be a bad choice, will i regret it, etc.

Im going to keep all the raw files, and a rendered file of each session, and would like to do that without doubling the space.

Anyone have a thought on this for me, recommend me a codec or a way to do this in a smart way? Thanks!

If I am on a Mac I use Prores HQ. When using Windows I use Quicktime PNG.