pradipta Posted September 4, 2006 Share Posted September 4, 2006 I want to know which is the best codec to use in architectural animation? I want the quality to be absolutely pure withour much loss in quality and size should be also optimized. I also dont want the user on the other end to install the codec before he want to see the animation. Is there any solution to this? How can I make an self-extracting EXE with combined codec so that the moment the user clicks on the file it starts playing in his comp. Thanks for any guide on this... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricardo Eloy Posted September 4, 2006 Share Posted September 4, 2006 Hum...have you tried Flash Video? You can create a EXE file that will contain the video and the player, so your client can simply double-click it and watch. And you can always control the quality... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted September 4, 2006 Share Posted September 4, 2006 http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bugga_Guy Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 You should really find out the how your client plans to use/look at the animation.. All codecs were made for different things - so the truth is there is no real "best Codec" to use. The most convient codec (due to its ability to play on both PC's and Mac's) and can run easily in powerpoint, or won't chug while playing would be a MPEG-1 codec. In my office for example we save 3 formats: Quicktime RAW, Sorenson 3 Quicktime (both for archieve and DVD) and Mpeg -1. Mpegs - 1 will play on any player and due to its size you can FTP, and rest assured it will run on a slow computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mahorela Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 I'm with Rick on this one. The Flash compression which is actually sorenson compression is excellent and allows for many options. You can then import that file into director and create a self extracting exe projector which has always worked well for me. Added to this is that if the animation is played on an older computer it will not start until it is completely loaded into ram which does away with the problematic jerky animation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoffc Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 excellent post, i was just going to ask the same question. I know zip, zero, nada about vid codecs. Here's my goal: I need to produce a fly-around animation, I'm guessing about 60 seconds in lenghth, to be either played on my sony vaio through a projector or tv input, or, burned to a dvd to be played through the projector or tv; for a planning commission meeting. Should I render to an uncompressed file and save to different codecs later? If so, which ones? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mahorela Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 I always render uncompressed files and then compress from there. Only way to go I reckon. I would not recommend flash compression for dvd, most people are using dv compression for that I think. Rendering uncompressed gives you options later as I think that from cd rom to dvd your definitely going to want to change codecs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 Mpeg-2 is the only thing you can use for DVD as far as I know.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
notamondayfan Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 ive jus used avi, and other formats and burnt it to dvd sucesfully. was using some other dvd creator software to create the dvd tho. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colinsmith Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 To make a true video DVD it will always end up compressed as MPEG2. That has 4:2:0 colour compression, while NTSC DV is 4:1:1. If you have the option in the software then don't use NTSC DV as a source for your MPEG2 compressor, you'd ditching lots of colour information. PAL DV is 4:2:0 too, so avoids the problem. Some standalone players will play DVD data disks with movies files on them compressed with other codecs, notable DivX. If you're paying back form a laptop then obviously you can burn a data DVD with any codec that's available on the laptop, although for best performance in that case you would be better copying the fiels to the hard rive and playing back from there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 we give clients animations on dvd these days too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IC Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 Yup always render as uncompressed images. That should be the first thing people are taught about animation. I like Sorensen for quicktime. I've found just about anyone can play that back and you can adjust the size of the file using the quality slider. I do an mpeg-1 .avi too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 i think i heard that with Flash 8, the cmpression in Flash is no longer creating using Sorenson as default, but it is still an option. i think macromedia/adobe wrote a copdec specifically for compression in Flash movies. as far as best codec... i have shifted my thought on this a couple of times. ...for awhile i was hard into the WMV camp because it was easy, fast, reliable, and would play on 98% (including macs) of the machines out there. now i lean towards Quicktime h.264 compression for distribution over web. i went with the quicktime over windows media because it has become reletively easy to encode, but most of all, it kicks WMV's butt on color accuracy compared to the original images. this is an area where i didn't find windows media format to be reliable. ....i thought some DVD players were supporting mpeg4 now. i could be wrong, maybe it was just a discussion a couple of years ago before things like BlueRay and HD-DVD starting emerging. ....but bottom line, my current prefrence is to distribute in Quicktime h.264. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoffc Posted September 5, 2006 Share Posted September 5, 2006 these are all great answers. may i ask what video software (freeware?) anyone is using for basic: encoding, editing, titles and perhaps adding a music track? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pradipta Posted September 6, 2006 Author Share Posted September 6, 2006 Thanks so much to everybody for the valuable inputs. For web, Divx is the one that comes up into the mind. Problem comes while delivering the animation files to the client. I would prefer quickTime for its quality, but, file size sometime goes up to high. recently Iam making an animation that is around 6 minutes long in 720 resolution and coming up nearly 1 gb in quick time format. Since i have to burn that animation in a cd I am confused as to what codec to use and keeping in mind the quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted September 6, 2006 Share Posted September 6, 2006 Thanks so much to everybody for the valuable inputs. For web, Divx is the one that comes up into the mind. Problem comes while delivering the animation files to the client. I would prefer quickTime for its quality, but, file size sometime goes up to high. recently Iam making an animation that is around 6 minutes long in 720 resolution and coming up nearly 1 gb in quick time format. Since i have to burn that animation in a cd I am confused as to what codec to use and keeping in mind the quality. try saving your animation out as in a lossless format such as Quicktime Animation at 100%. then use Quciktime Pro to export the movie using their predifined settings for the h.264 codec. if you are sending a CD, then use the LAN/Intranet predifined settings. you can then go into options to tweak the resolution and such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pradipta Posted September 7, 2006 Author Share Posted September 7, 2006 yes, i did that with QuickTime, the quality was good and size was ok. but, most of the people still dont have the QT player in their comp, so that can be a major problem. I found a way to solve the codec problem to certain extent. i used mpeg-2 codes that stays as default with windows media player. i checked in almost 25 different windows xp machines and it was playing fine and the quality is superb at 720 resolution. it was a real pain doing the render, although ;-) xvid also makes a very good quality output and i found with media player 10 in windows xp, xvid encoded files can be played back without installing xvid separately. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colinsmith Posted September 7, 2006 Share Posted September 7, 2006 I'm not 100% up to date on what MS is doing with XP now, but it certainly used to be the case that media player did not have mpeg2 codecs installed as standard, they only came as an extra, or when you installed a dvd player program. I guess Media Cnetre should bring them codecs.... not sure if Media Player 10 already has them as standard.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tcorbett Posted September 8, 2006 Share Posted September 8, 2006 As much as I hate to admit it, the WMV9 codec is pretty good -- I've been using it for NTSC Widescreen resolution -- although I haven't been using it for web delivery yet. Current size is approx. 8MB per minute of animation at my settings. FLV is a good bet too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 Hum...have you tried Flash Video? You can create a EXE file that will contain the video and the player, so your client can simply double-click it and watch. And you can always control the quality... I usually include a variety of outputs as part of my deliverable package, and the Flash video - converted to an .exe. file - is perfect. Anyone can play it, regardless of whether or not they even have Flash. I've found that absolutely nothing compares to the quality of the compression using Flash video. In many cases it's near perfect quality, at a fraction of the file size when compared to other compression options. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 Anyone can play it, regardless of whether or not they even have Flash. ...unless they are on mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted September 18, 2006 Share Posted September 18, 2006 ...unless they are on mac. ...in which case you output as a .hqx Mac projector file; though I can't speak to the quality, as I don't have a Mac and none of my clients use them either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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