I’ve got a question about a little bit of information that I strangely haven’t been able to find anywhere…: What is the framerate of the animation supposed to be?
Latest specs that I know:
640x480 AVI, Cinepak compression
Hmm, that’s another question: To what quality should it be compressed?
Thanks!
Highest quality and I believe you’re supposed to render at the NTSC (is that the right acronym?) standard which is about 30 fps. I haven’t seen any official rulings but these are my best guesses.
Yeah, 30 fps is just about the standard… higher might not play right, and lower makes your animation seem amateurish.
It’s really quite depressing that Cinepak codec at “highest quality” looks terrible. If FIRST would concede and let us go with a DivX compression, I would be a happier camper.
Cinepak is EXTINCT compression type, I don’t know why FIRST won’t let us use DivX (maybe cuz it requires high system specs to use). It would be good if we used anything but Cinepak, something like Indeo or otherwise. NTSC standard frame rate is actually 29.97 fps, which can be rounded up to 30. Don’t use anything higher than 30 though, it’s just a hassle in 3DS Max and you only get a marginal increase in animation at double the size of the file. Also, does anyone know if we can compress the audio?
The only reason I can think of why Autodesk(note: Autodesk was the one making the ruling on this, as they’re the ones doing the judging, not FIRST) would have chosen Cinepak over anything else is that they can guarantee that every system out there has it…Cinepak is included with just about every current version of Windows, and so everybody’s got it. Opening up to a choice of codecs means that one of two scenarios would take place:
-every team would have to include an installer for the codec they used, and the judges at Autodesk would have to install all of them(possibly up to 700+!).
-some team would end up not getting judged because the file they sent in couldn’t be read on the judges’ machine.
I was under the impression that work was to be submitted “UNCOMPRESSED”?? 640x480
Didnt the guidelines in the rulebook say that the .avi needs to be submitted uncompressed?
It did, but don’t be fooled! One of the Team Updates (I forget which at the moment) revised it and specified a 640x480 animation compressed with the Cinepak Codec. An uncompressed AVI would never fit on a CD, ye gods!
why do they require the size be 640 x 480??? it shouldn’t really make a difference becuase they will blow it up to be full screen no matter what… is it just another one of those things that really has no point except to make things stadard
640 x 480 probably is easier for the Autodesk video guys to work with when they branch it off to a VHS. Also, TVs don’t have that good of a resolution, there’s are actually lower than 640x480 so your animation won’t look much better if it was 1024x728 or something like 1600x1200.