Upload animations?

[A. Leese]

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the correct section or not, but it's about animation and you all may be able to help me out..

OK. Someome recomended to me that I post our animations that we've done on our team's website. A few questions:
1. what's the html to show an animation or how do I code it?
2. Aren't the files huge? Should I just make it so people can d/l them and view them or have some sort of a play for them?
3. What file format exactly are they in (we use 3D studio max to make ours)?

I guess it's easy to sum it up like this: I can get both of our animations put on CD. What do I do now to get them online and viewable?

Thanks in advance to anyone who gives me any sort of help on this. This is totally out there for me to really even think about.

~Angela who prefers nice, simply coding..like bg colors with HTML

[Suneet]

Whatever you do, you can usually just post the final file as a direct link. Depending on the format, it will download or stream automatically.

What's the file extension? If it's a .mov , you can probably just post it (check the file size to see if it's reasonable.) If it's a .avi, though, you're going to have to compress it, as it's probably huge; too big even for a download.

What's the file extension, and how big is it?

The best compressor is the Windows Media 8 encoder (part of the 7.1 kit.) Quicktime has one too, but it's not freeware and not as good, though it's easier to use.
The Windows Media encoder is a rather complex bit of software, so unless you know someone who uses it, I'll have to give you some very specific pointers. Also, the WME requires some audio in the source file, I don't know why... but if the animation doesn't have any audio, you'll be better off with Quicktime.

Windows Media Encoder

If you wan't to chat for realtime help I'm, 111083857 on ICQ, and GrandAdmThrawn on MSN.

[Jon Lawton]

Originally posted by Suneet
...

The best compressor is the Windows Media 8 encoder (part of the 7.1 kit.) Quicktime has one too, but it's not freeware and not as good, though it's easier to use.
The Windows Media encoder is a rather complex bit of software, so unless you know someone who uses it, I'll have to give you some very specific pointers. Also, the WME requires some audio in the source file, I don't know why... but if the animation doesn't have any audio, you'll be better off with Quicktime.

Hey now... don't forget DivX (a la Project Mayo), or DivX ;-) (a la Microsoft ). Both are free as in beer, and one is free as in freedom. Decent quality, and not terribly complex either... but... the "end-user" would need the codec installed. May I point out that Windows Media and Quicktime are harldy free in any sense of the term? (Of course I don't know the population of OSS people here!) Just a thought.

At any rate, we aren't talking about a huge chunk of video, most any format ought to hack it down to a manageable size with no problem.

[Suneet]

Oh yeah, DivX. That's not a web compressor, though, is it? Looks like it is...

I think I can get it form divx.com.

I'll give it a try

[wes16zeus]

i take my small animations that are about 6 megs and change it to a real media file (.rm) and it goes down to 800k and looks just the same but i have a program called real producer from real media. does a great job and its easy to put in your page. you can either use it as a link like:


you can check out one that i was playing around with at:
http://www.willbaugh.com/videos/wes.rm

<a href="/videos/video1.rm"> Click here </a> or:

you can put it in as an object so it plays actually on your page. im great with web designing so if you need any question then you can im me on aim at wes16zeus

Hope that helps

[A. Leese]

Thanks for your help. I have yet to even get the animations form someone. If need be, I'm just going to transfer them from video to DVD or even CDR. I guess I'll just print out your all's ideas and look at them when I have at least an inlking of what you all are talking about. I guess I'm just slow when it comes to most web stuff (sorry). Again, thanks for your help. Be warned I may be contacting one or more of you all with stupid questions once I have those animations in hand.
~Angela