question about the animation rule

[stevek]

I know its a little late, but I just want to confirm the rules and clearify a previous post.

First things first- The rules say "At Your Discression" the update was just to give you a guide if you didnt know any better. Based on all that I read- you should be OK with DivX.

Second- To Clear thing up- A Format would be a file type- IE AVI, quicktime, MPG, etc. Then there are CoDec's- This stands for Compressor/Decompressor. Each format has many different CoDec's (Except MPG which is a pretty set standard-Mpeg1 and Mpeg2) (Before anyone responds about MPEG 4- That is a Codec and is used by Microsoft as a base for their Windows Media Format and recently by QT.) Cinepak and Indeo are Codec's not formats. If you rendered in AVI then Indeo or Cinepak are good choices. If you run in Quicktime then you have other options.

I chose QT with Sorenson3- Which is a standard install with Quicktime. It gave me great quality at a relativly low file size.

The key is that they arent dumping all these files on to the judges computers and hoping that they play- they are making a DVD (I'm pretty sure) and having them review the DVD. So the less compressed your file the better. This way if they do make a DVD they will be compressing it again so you want to start with the highest posible quality so it still looks good later. Thats why last year the originally asked for uncompressed formats- until somone actually did the math to see it wouldnt fit on the CD.

Hope all goes well and there are no issues because of the Codec. I sent a reply to a post in the beginning of Jan when the rules came out that not being specific on Codec and format issues will cause problems. Now lets hope I was wrong.

Good luck to all on the Animations and the Robot competition