My best cool animation…sort of…but I need advice on what format and size to post it. Currently its 540 X 360 AVI RAW but one problem, its 1.09 G. at 2,020 frames. How can I reduce the size without loseing the clean quality? Right now all I have is Virtual Dub, but everytime I reduce it like to Cinepak it turns out looking bad. Also, should I save as MPEG 4? any general advice? I suppose I’ll post it on youtube…Thank You. Cindy Lou Who
Fixed. Thanks for all your advice. h264 seems to be the way to go.It took a 1 Gig animation down to 2.5 megs, although with a slight loss of texture and color, but worth the size results…will post video soon.
http://majorgeeks.com/Super_d5117.html - possibly the best free convertor out there. Best I’ve used anyway. It does a good job of .h264 compression with .mov files. Only thing is the gamma gets affected a bit - ie washes out darker tones a bit. Not technically what happens, but thats the overall effect it has. If you look up ‘gamma h.264’ there is a workaround or two out there.
Also - vimeo.com usually does a better job of compression than youtube. When putting it online you definately wont want to upload a 1.09 gb file. Even if you cut it back to 100mb or less before putting it online. 10 -20mb should be a reasonable size.
Is there an internal way of rendering my animation in a smaller file size? Why is my animation so large? Is it because of the particles? It seems that any animation that is only over a minute should not be over a Gig.
It is so big because avi raw is an uncompressed file format. If you choose FFmpeg in the dropdown list you can have more video options. If you want to keep it an avi then you can go to the video tab and choose avi as the format and xvid as the codec.
Thanks…Ill try your advice. All I want to do is keep the clarity and in a format where I can post it on vimeo or youtube. Im guessing it is impossible to reduce the file size and keep the clarity of the video, but I have seen many clear videos on youtube so there must be a way of doing it. I dont care if its AVI or not, but it seems that Vista does not support MPEG. I wish there was a magic answer like render it in this format and codec…would it help if I rendered it in a large size, compressed it, then shrunk it down? I just hate seeing those little pixel boxes when I compress it. Makes all the work I put into my animation look like crap.
I appolgize, I think I posted this in the wrong section…
I use quicktime animation, if possible, in png sequence usually, so the file uploaded is not compressed, but really faster to upload than avi raw.
If it’s more than a few seconds, I use quicktime animation jpg, which is quite good.
I do not recommend to use use h264, or frame predicted formats for uploading faster, if you want to keep a decent quality.
Vimeo also offers HD uploads for free, which is better than Ytube imho.
Edit : you should be able to reconvert your avi raw into qt directly within blender, with VSE, if qt supported.
Great advice delic. You know I did not think to save my animations in PNG or JPEG, run them through the seqence editor and then save them as a file. This has obvious advantages since it took 22 hours to render 2000 frames. It still takes that long but now if I want to edit a few frames it makes it much easier to pick them out of the sequence editor. Makes it much easier to test differant formats and such. You get a cookie.
Best practice is to render to .exr files using the exr or multilayer format (depending on if you need render layers/passes saved separately). This allows you to correct gamma, mess around in the compositing stage with the maximum amount of control. Then run that through the compositor and render to a video format. I usually render to AVI RAW and then convert that to h264 with Super (which BenDansie reccommended above). It handles gamma far better than blender seems to with h264.
O.K.ben, I’ll try that. I have managed to get this thing down to 80 - 100 megs, but thats still to big. I like the idea of going through the sequencer though. Ill download the Super like BenDansie says… h264 through Blender kills the color as you said. I sort of like just black and white…gives it hat old flavor and mystery…but hate to lose the purples, reds and greens…
