Animation Settings

[JMBknvc]

Hello, everyone out there. This is my first post to the site. So, I hope I did not pack to many questions into one post.

 

I am starting to do animations and was wanting some help on fine tuning the settings. I understand it is better to render out your frames as a .tga .bmp or .tif then use the RAM Player to create the .avi file. Which format would be the best to work with if you needed to edit them in photoshop? Then, what would be your min. resolution setting be for rendering the frames. I know it depands on what you are going to be doing. So, most of my animations will be played back full screen on a computer screens/laptops or projected onto a large screen for presentations. As for frames per sceonds (fps) I have been using 30 fps but am thinking of going 24 fps to help save on rendering time. However, I wonder if quality will be lost by reducing the fps? Then last but not least is the codecs codes used to create the .avi. I know nothing about them so any help in which one would best suit my purpose would be helpful, or is there a place I can go and research the codecs codes to get a better understanding the pro's and con's.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

render to a minimum of NTSC standards. read about the differences when using square and rectangular pixels in this format, it is important.

 

i like to save my frames as tiff's, but tga will work fine also. i don't know a lot about .bmp. ...higher end animation will use .rpa, .rpf, .hdri, or someother format that includes extra information that can be used in post process.

 

30 frames a second. NTSC standard is actually 29.97, but you will not notice the minimal difference.

 

the codec issue is always open for a debate. there has been a handful of threads discussing these, although none that i can remember in at least 6 months. it usually comes down to what you are comfortable with.

 

your realistic choices are Quicktime Sorenson, Quicktime h.264, Windows Media, Divx, or, although typically the worst quality, mpeg4.

 

each has their advantages,and disadvantages. if we are doing a contracted animation, we supply a numbered frames sequence in jpeg format (also a highly debated subject, because i am taking away quality before they are compressed), and a compressed Windows Media file at full res. We will also supply a compressed video and resolution for web playback if needed.