I have just completed my very first animation. ( how exciting) It runs about 6 seconds. However when I first press play to play it. the animation runs about 10 seconds picking up random parts of the animation not in sequence. Then it settles down and plays it as it should. Where is the magic switch that solves this problem? Thanks.
this is not a problem at all.
your animation is stored on your slow hard drive which cannot provide (for 25 frames persec at pal resolution) 30Mb of animation per second. the animation on the second run is stored in the memory of the computer rather than the hard drive.
this means it is running nice and smooth on the second or later run throughs of the animation. after a certain size animation your computer will never play it smooth.
one way to solve this is to use video editing software to compress it using a codec. such as Divx or Xvid.
this will make the file smaller (as small or large as you want) i tend to use about 1.5 Mb per sec. as its good quality and small enough to play without jerking.
hope that helped you.
I use a copy of TMPGEnc (free for noncommercial, Wintel) to convert my raw AVIs into MPEG-1 format for viewing, as my computer has the same hardware slowdown… Decoding the image is alot faster than trying to grab raw frames off the hard drive in realtime.
Thanks for the information and inspiration. In searching for possible compression files I found a movie maker for windows xp which at this point has all that I desire. Those who run windows xp might be interested. It creates titles, compresses animations, modifies frames in various ways. And it is free. Found at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsXP/moviemaker/downloads/moviemaker2beta.asp