Hello all.
First of all, I’m new to Blender (and 3D works in general) I’ve had it about a week and I just compleated my first animation. It’s about 12 seconds long. Anyway, my issue/question is this:
I have used the Inedo 5.1 codec in my compression…but the file is still quite large, I think. It’s about 9MB, making it very hard to show anyone online. Is there a better way to save and/or compress my animations to more usable sizes? Or is this huge file size the norm?
I appreciate any help you seasoned vets can offer!
~Rael
When delivering to the web, you sometimes need to produce an output that is low-res and highly compressed just to make it small. The output image-size might also be small just to make the file smaller.
It is good to initially prepare the output at high resolution and quality, and 9MB filesizes for 12 seconds of animation are not unheard-of. But when you’re ready to deploy the product to the web, you might need to (for example) reduce the image-size or picture-quality to obtain better compression. There are ways to do this without re-rendering using the Sequence Editor … but I don’t really want to “snow” you with too many details yet. (You can search for my previous posts.)
The Indeo CODEC is a good general purpose one that will allow just about anyone to view it. It is not very good for filesize.
MPEG-4 CODECs will give the best size/quality results. Microsoft and Quicktime both have MPEG-4 CODECs, but there are better free ones available. The first one to catch on in any real way was DivX ( http://www.divx.com ). There is a lot of content out there that is compressed with DivX. The drawback is that the Microsoft Media Player will not automatically download the CODEC. A user has to install the DivX CODEC.
Another option is XVid (it is DivX spelled backwards). The XVid CODEC provides better quality than the DivX for most source video. http://www.xvid.org/
The main drawback is that it isn’t as prevalent as DivX. It may take a year or two for it to really catch on.
As a rule of thumb, I figure that a DivX compressed file will be .5-1% of the filesize of the original uncompressed AVI. Keep in mind that audio can add a lot to the final file size.
Here is another worthwhile site for general information: