converting animation submission to flash

[Gary Dillard]

OK, pretend for a minute that I have no knowledge of 3dStudio Max, Movie Maker, Quicktime, or Flash other than clicking on a file a letting it run. Actually, you don't have to pretend because it's quite true.

Our animation team put together a dynamite animation that I understand takes about 240 MB (since the requirement is "well under 250"). I would like to store this animation on our website in some format that can be accessed and played in a reasonable length of time, and I'm guessing that a 240 MB quicktime movie doesn't meet that criteria.

Is there a straightforward way to export this into Flash or Real or something that will compress it or stream it and make it usable, or is that really a labor intensive job?

[Kevin Thorp]

When we made a .WMV version (Windows streaming video) of our animation the file size went down to 4 meg - and it looks almost as good as the 133 meg file we uploaded.

There are other compressed video formats out there but they require you to download some sort of driver to view them. I've given up on RealPlayer. It installs way too much junk.

[Kevin Thorp]

Originally Posted by Kevin342

When we made a .WMV version (Windows streaming video) of our animation the file size went down to 4 meg - and it looks almost as good as the 133 meg file we uploaded.

There are other compressed video formats out there but they require you to download some sort of driver to view them. I've given up on RealPlayer. It installs way too much junk.

If you want, I can convert your animation to .WMV. We use Pinnacle Studio 9.

[robot180]

What about mpeg? I don't know if the quality will drop and/or if it will be a smaller file.

I can convert it to whatever format, but thanks for offering. I just don't know which format is best. How about Flash?

[Kevin Thorp]

We can generate better quality WMVs for a given file size than MPEG, but why not try it both ways & pick the one that looks best?

I've used an older version of FLASH, but not for videos. It does a great job of compressing line art and 2d animation. Not too sure about video.

[iamnafets]

Flash is terrible for compressing video, not only are the files huge, but they are also bad looking (lots of artifacts) in my opinion. The only real advantage there is they don't have to download anything they probably don't already have. I'd probably go with RealPlayer or a WMV, the WMV encoder is free (think real is too?) and you can tweak it to fit best with the bandwidth on your server.

[robot180]

I'll use a WMV. Which program should I use to convert it? I was going to use Premiere, but that doesn't work here. (installation problem) I tried After Effects, but that doesn't have WMV as an option for exporting. I saw AVI though. I assume AVI is much larger, but maybe once it is an AVI, I can convert it to WMV.

Basically, how do I get it from Quicktime to WMV?

[Kevin Thorp]

We use Pinnacle Studio 9 to create WMVs, but I don't think it'll open a MOV. We had 3ds max output an AVI to start with.

You might try searching cnet or shareware.com for video conversion utilities.

[Joe Matt]

You can always pay the $30 (or illegally, whatever floats your boat) get Quicktime Pro, then convert the mpg into .mp4 file, which is more compressed and better quality.

[Yov]

you should use the XViD codec, I got our animation down to 3.5 mb with no visible quality loss.

[Kyle Fenton]

You can export a .flv which is a Flash format for video. It isn't that good in terms of quality vs size but you can do a bunch of funky things with it.
But there is no way that I know of, to convert a 3dx max animation to a flash animation. Flash is very 2D based, which would make it impractical.

Your best bet, like suggested above would to be use an MPEG-4 codec (3IVX,DIVX,XVID, etc)