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)

[syntaxers]

windows movie maker saves in wmv. I got my 90 MB AVI down to 1.6 MB medium-low quality.

[Pachu]

If you can afford to spend some money try out Swift 3d, heres the link to their website:

http://www.erain.com/

Hope that helps!

[syntaxers]

Discreet has their Plasma product, but costs some money $$$ An alternative is Illustrate 5.3 which is a plugin for 3dsmax which contains a toon-shading renderer and can export to swf. As I recall, it comes with a 30-day trial offer before it is disabled.

[theory6]

Not contradicting any of the above posts but there is an alternate method of bringing in your animation into flash.

1: First make a new folder anywhere and call it ANIM_FRAMES.
2: In 3DSM goto render (F10) and select the smallest resolution ratio given.
3: Click on the File Types button and the Save As Type dialog box opens. Browse to the new folder called ANIM_FRAMES that u created. Now in the drop down box just below the name box pick the JPEG option. Now press okay or select.
4: You should now find yourself in the Render Dialog again. Make sure you pick your JPG quality as 70% or lower. Higher than that is not required for web purposes.
5: You can play with the rest of the render settings if you want. Make sure you select the ENTIRE TIME SEGMENT option before you render. Now you can click the RENDER button at the bottom.
6: Now it should render all your frames as images and put them in your ANIM_FRAMES folder. It might take some time depending on your animation.
7: Once the rendering is complete, open up Flash MX (I assume your using MX).
8: In Flash insert a movie clip by pressing F8 and picking movie clip. Call the movie clio something like mclAnimation.
9: Now goto FILE>IMPORT and browse to your ANIM_FRAMES folder. Pick the FIRST image that appears in that folder. It should be sumthing like "youranimationname0001.jpg". You have to pick the first image for this to work. Once you select your first image Flash has this great feature where it will ask you "This image is part of a sequence of image. Do you want to import the entire sequence into your timeline?" Obviously you pick yes. Now Flash automatically places all your images of your animation into each frame. You will have some 1000 odd frames, possibly more or less.
10: Now all you have to do is export your flash file as a .SWF and you can upload it or show it playing on your website. I'm wildly guessing your animation should be around 20 - 30MB, perhaps less and you won't need any codecs, plugins, etc. Just Flash Player to view.

This whole process should take you no more than 2 hours, beginner or not.

If you have any more questions, PM me. Good luck!