best data transfer rate for CD?

[Ernest Burden III]

Any thoughts about an upper limit for data transfer rate when authoring animation for CD playback on unknown computers?

 

I have heard numbers as low as 200K/sec. Using a setting like that reduces any animation to a muddled mess.

[Chris_A]

In my experience it can be run up a bit (300KBps for 4x CD playback) but also depends heavily on the CODEC used. A few of the better compressors take enough horsepower to decompress that slow machines will suffer from skipping frames even with lower data rates.

 

Have you tried playing with the frame rate and keyframe rates?

 

[ December 10, 2002, 01:34 PM: Message edited by: Chris_A ]

[Ernest Burden III]

I had been having pretty good results with not forcing a data rate at all, but do see some dropped frames on some machines. But at even 300K/sec. the animation can get fairly messed up.

 

I have been sticking to Indeo5 again for the 'unknown' computer, though I much prefer DivX.

 

Have you tried playing with the frame rate and keyframe rates?

No, haven't gotten there yet. I have let the defaults handle the keyframes so far, though I have tried 'optomise stills' since I am working with anims with some stills and titles.

 

It's hard to go from the beautiful playback you can get on a good workstation to a crappy crunched res-down. But having someone else see your smooth camera moves turned into an MTV chop-up isn't much better.

 

The other possibility is, as suggested to me recently under a diferent topic, to use MPEG encoding. This is another option to explore and may be better for cross-platform CDs.

[Chris_A]

It's awful when beautiful work gets compressed into oblivion. The hard core video compressors (i.e. Cleaner) are able to do wonders.

 

In truth I've resorted to creating WindowsMedia and Quicktime versions to handle the platform issues. Unfortunately it's easier to do this than deal with the multitude of other issues that tend to crop up, especially when creating for the general public.