My file size is too big.....

[JamesWu]

I'm almost done with the animation....I know it's pretty fast to be done...But thats not the point. I had rendered everything in max in mov format and mpeg4 compression...Then i dl'd Premiere Pro Trial and loaded everything in with the slate and all. Then i rendered it again, and absolutly according to the specs...720*480, DV-NTSC, 29.97fps and .mov, so why is it that the file size is 261mB... Especially when they said to keep the file size well under 250 megs.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by JamesWu

I'm almost done with the animation....I know it's pretty fast to be done...But thats not the point. I had rendered everything in max in mov format and mpeg4 compression...Then i dl'd Premiere Pro Trial and loaded everything in with the slate and all. Then i rendered it again, and absolutly according to the specs...720*480, DV-NTSC, 29.97fps and .mov, so why is it that the file size is 261mB... Especially when they said to keep the file size well under 250 megs.

Here we go again. 2 years ago autodesk gave codec requrements that produced files that wont fit on a CD. (of course they changed it in team update). Similar things now....

Try emailing Autodesk?

[Soukup]

hmmmm.....

this is a shot in the dark, last year we rendered un-compressed frames in Max. Then we went in an compressed them in premiere using the codec specifications we did last year. I think that you are running into problems b/c it has to compress twice. Have you rendered to still shots from max? If you do that output to a tiff (best quality). That is the only possible thing that I think could help you.

if u have to email autodesk put EMERGENCY in the title. They usually respond a little faster. Otherwise it will take 3-5 weeks to get a straight answer.

[Lev]

I just did some test renders, and 250mb seems a little high. I did moderately complex scene (color-distribution wise) and rendered 900 frame sequence - so far its been 115, and 105mb Is it premiere thats spitting out these huge files? or did max do same thing?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

you should have rendered the original file out of max in the highest possible setting. I'm not sure cuz i havent used max... but it would probably be an uncompressed DV standard AVI. Then you could compress it in premiere (theres a tool in it that will size it automatically, all you have to do is give it guidelines such as frame size, and final size(under 250 mb's)) Trying to compress a compression just isnt going to work. Heres an example. Take a wav file of a song and compress it to mp3. Add this to a zip archive. Then take that original wav and do the same. You will see the pecentage each drops down is quite different. (I know this isnt what you are looking for, but it is just an example)

[Kevin Sevcik]

Compressing a compression, I think, has different issues than are being discussed here. I can't see doing a lossy compression twice as actually increasing file size by a significant amount. However, doing lossy compression twice will definitely adversely affect the quality of the video.

So basically, I agree with most here. Render the animation as an uncompressed AVI, or a series of lossless compressed TIFs, then dump that into Premiere, edit what you want, and compress it from there. Premiere should give you enough options to fiddle with the compression quality and get it down to size. I wouldn't let premiere actually resize the video to get it to size though. Aside from the video resolution formatting requirements, resizing the video will, again, mess with the quality. If it absolutely has to be resized, render it again if you have time.

Also note, the plus about rendering to a series of TIFs is that you can grab a load of your teammates spare computers, network them, and do a network render over a weekend.

[Matt Hallock]

If you change your size to 640x480, the other acceptable size, your file size will be smaller.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Matt Hallock

If you change your size to 640x480, the other acceptable size, your file size will be smaller.

This might not be an option if you designed all of your scenes with 720x480 in mind. Plus, 640x480 requires re-rendering, which at this point in time is kinda late.

[Matt Hallock]

Depending on how complex your scene is, maybe not. On the animation I did, it took nearly a week to get everything rendered out (Non-stop renderthon on four computers and it still took a good school-week to be done), so if you're like us, you'd basically be stuck with what you have. I think you can change the physical size of a file in Premiere though.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Matt Hallock

Depending on how complex your scene is, maybe not. On the animation I did, it took nearly a week to get everything rendered out (Non-stop renderthon on four computers and it still took a good school-week to be done), so if you're like us, you'd basically be stuck with what you have. I think you can change the physical size of a file in Premiere though.

right, so basically if you have complex scenes, and chose 720x480, you are screwed because of poor rule requirements.

[JamesWu]

Well I found out why my file size was so huge....I rendered uncompressed in premiere. So I rerendered the final draft and it was 90megs and the quality was appalling. I think the bad quality is because of rendering in max as a .mov mpeg4 commpression. However, it puzzles me that the still images, placed in premiere, also have bad image quality. It should have good quality despite the twicecompressed 3d portions. Please reply to confirm this.

[JamesWu]

Okay....Does anyone think mpeg4 compression would be considered unacceptable or "nonstandard"? The rules say: 'Acceptable CodecsV-NTSC and Cinepak. Do not use DIVX or any other non-standard Codec.' Does that mean only DV-NTSC and Cinepak are acceptable or are DV-NTSC and Cinepak only examples of acceptable codecs.

[Matt Hallock]

Considering they are asking us to render TV size and with TV compressions, yes, anything but the two listed would be considered non-standard.

[LBK Rules]

A Question:

Is the "DV - NTSC" the same as the "DV/DVCPRO - NTSC" codec?

Note:

We are rendering our animation form max in the "Animation" codec. We will export as an AVI (Indeo 5.10) from our editing software, and we will convert it to MOV in max (Prob. Cinepak (Our DV tests have been worse then Cinepak)).

[Rysith]

I certainally hope that DV/DVCPRO - NTSC codec is the one that they were referring to when they asked for DVNTSC, because otherwise we've rendered to the wrong format =). On file sizes, I'm getting around a 130MB file with DV/DVCPRO and sound, and it seems to look fine (although interestingly enough it looks fine when it comes out of MAX, but horrible coming out or priemier. Not sure who to blame there...). I still wish that they let us choose codec this year (last year we used a lossless codec and it looked very nice).