Universal animation

[ZFact]

Hi;

Im just wondering, what codec and size and format

would best be suited for an animation which potentially

may be played on wide screen tv thru DVD player

and played on a computer... ?

 

Cheers

[Arnold Gallardo]

This has nothing to do DIRECTLY with CODEC. Codec determines your BITRATE and quality of the video. How big your files are is determined by the CODEC. You should look into your DVD AUTHORING program more as well as your DVD BUNER software as well as the BURNER software itself. I tend to BURN with NERO and Author on DVD Architect.

 

As for the widescreen this nomally means 16:9 format. The NTSC standard uses 720x480 size but the 'aspect ratio' is changed. This means the PIXELS are either wide or narrow depending on the aspect ratio settings. Most DVD players will recognize if the video is 19:6 or 4:3x and change the playback accordingly. You will want to do this because not all people have 16:9 displays YET so you want then to be also playable on 4:3 displays.

 

 

 

You have to understand that the DVD itself is ONLY a STANDARD. That means not all IMPLEMENTATIONS of it will be identical they just have to follow certain standards, how they are directly implemnetd are up to the manufacturer. In most cases you will run into this problem if your client is using a DVD player that is MADE for commercially pressed DVD movies only. Those have problems playing DVD-Rs and more so with DUAL LAYER DVD-+Rs.

 

For your DVD to be universally played you need to have it MASTERED and burned commercially.

[colinsmith]

I would render the 3d to a sequence of stills and use that as a base for post production and any further encoding.

 

If it was purely for video (DVD) I'd probably use the standard PAL pixel sizes and ratios, but there might be some slight advantage in rendering to the equivalent square pixel sizes.

 

I do not usually render interlaced field, whatever I expect the output to be, just sticking with 25fps progressive.

 

Rendering directly to a PAL animation codec is not usually a good idea, as it stores less colour information, leaving you working hard if you mix it up in post.

[landrvr1]

I would render the 3d to a sequence of stills and use that as a base for post production and any further encoding.

 

If it was purely for video (DVD) I'd probably use the standard PAL pixel sizes and ratios, but there might be some slight advantage in rendering to the equivalent square pixel sizes.

 

Excellent point. If there's any possibility at all that the animation would be viewed on a PC, I'd render it out as stills with square pixels. If you know for sure that it's DVD/widescreen TV only, then go for the native widescreen rectangular pixel format.

 

If you go rectangular, this generally means that no adjustment on the monitor to achieve wide screen will be necessary when popping in the disc. All of my stuff has to be playable on PCs as well, so I render with square pixels. This always means that an end user will have to adjust the 'widescreen' adjust button on their monitor in order to have the image fill the entire screen on their LCD or Plasma, but that's how it goes.

[AJLynn]

Why not just render out in the PAL DVD format, encode the video using MPEG-2 that's PAL DVD compliant, make an actual DVD and burn it to DVD+-R, which will play in DVD players made in the last few years and on computers with DVD drives? If you later decide you want, say, an AVI file in a more computer-compliant pixel format, you can make like a h4x0r and rip the DVD.

[colinsmith]

Yup, but if you end up needing a 16:9 wmv for example then you will have to make up a video comp to get a file with square pixels, as WMP doesn't understand pixel aspect ratios.

 

If you are really 100% sure how the files will be used then you can baes workflow round that, if you have doubts then a sequence of square pixel stills lets you rework it to anything else with no quality drop.

[AJLynn]

A decent encoding and DVD authoring system will cope with square pixels, or a halfway-respectable freeware DVD transfer program will cope with nonsquare pixels, or you can make an AVI in nonsquare pixels and a corresponding AVS file to play it in WMP or re-encode with square pixels... or Premiere can take the sequence of images with nonsquare pixels and reformat them... there are a ton of ways to do this, but it sounded like the primary goal was to make a DVD, so it should be done natively in the DVD's format (so the DVD will have the highest possible quality) and if other formats are needed, those can be dealt with later.