Premiere Pro CS6
Windows 7 64-bit
So I have a large number of product shots that are .AVI's . I am color correcting these shots in After Effects and exporting them back out as AVI's currently. Then editing together the color corrected AVI's in Premiere Pro and exporting as h.264 for the final product. (Dynamic Link has caused a lot of problems for me and lost several projects so I'm trying to stay away from it) A couple of things are happening.
1. When I export the color corrected shots out of After Affects as .AVI's, the file size balloons to a HUGE size (way bigger than the original clip). Even though on export I select "Match sequence settings"
2. As these large AVI's have stacked up they have taken up all my harddrive space.
So my question is really, how should I be exporting and storing my color corrected shots so that I have them for future use and editing. I have read a little bit about "Intermediate Formats", but i'm not sure what would be good for me. I'd like to make sure that I don't degrade the quality of the shots, so i'm hesitant to convert all my huge .AVI's to H.264's to have them for editing later. What should I be doing here?