Important: What format should we send with the animation. The 3d max format or AVI format.
Also, i am a little confuesed about the student judge part in the rule. Am i supposed to pick a member from my animation team to be one of the judge.
Reply ASAP please.
I sent my animation in .avi I believe that that is the required file format, for animation judging, you select one student representivite to judge.
You may either submit in .avi or .mov (quicktime format)
where does it say about the prizes?
what about the intro and end, any format for that?
Actually I think the manual was very very very exact as to the format, i believe in a team update they opened it up, but I think it best to stay with the original.
One cd with no credits
One cd with credits
the movies to be .avi 640x480 rendered in the Cinepak Codec Radius Format.
*Originally posted by Chubtoad *
**Actually I think the manual was very very very exact as to the format, i believe in a team update they opened it up, but I think it best to stay with the original.One cd with no credits
One cd with creditsthe movies to be .avi 640x480 rendered in the Cinepak Codec Radius Format.
RTFM **
Actually, it says that compression amount is at the discretion of the participants in the rules. Later they went and said that they prefer either Cinepak, Intel Indeo, or Quicktime. I personally went with Indeo.
well, here is another question…does the judge from the team have to be the same as the team champion?
*Originally posted by LizJJury *
**well, here is another question…does the judge from the team have to be the same as the team champion? **
No, matter of fact it can’t be unless that person was on animations, and it has to be a student.
as for the prizes, I answered this in another thread, though they wern’t released I believe that they will be the same as last years… Laptop for one person and the school with a ton of software for the winning team. And other honorable mentions will recieve software.
*Originally posted by Chris Nowak *
**compression amount is at the discretion of the participants in the rules. **
Yes the compression is, this way you can make sure it fits on the cd, however dont’ confuse compression with resolution. You don’t want to make your video bigger then 640 because depending on the systems they are showing it on it might run a lot slower than on your machine. the Compression is the quality of the video at the given resolution. The higher resolution and less compression you use, the nicer it will look but the slower it will run.
In the past they have made it obvious that some of the computers that the judges are shown these vids on, aren’t of the highest quality. We would all love to make it 800x600 and just compress it with divx, unfortunatly i doubt many of the judges comptuers have the Divx Codec :eek:
Next year they should make sure the judge’s computers have DivX and let us use that, it would be a great use for it.
thanks everyone!!!
hmm… we submitted the animation in DivX codec since it doesn’t say that we HAVE to use either of those 3 formats… so are we gonna be ok ? or…
*Originally posted by Devil’s Kid *
**hmm… we submitted the animation in DivX codec since it doesn’t say that we HAVE to use either of those 3 formats… so are we gonna be ok ? or… **
Well, if they DQ you for not being able to see it, you have grounds to debate it. They simply stated “prefer cinepak, indeo, or quicktime”, which leads one to assume you could use whatever. However, being you did submit in DivX, there may come a time when you may have to brawl a little, but im going to take a wild guess and say your not the only team that did this.
They probably won’t notify you as to if you are DQ’ed, so you might want to contact FIRST/AutoDesk and tell them you did this, and (in case they didn’t know) the DivX codec is freely available as a decoder at divx.com . You generally shouldn’t submit stuff to someone that doesn’t come with windows. This includes if they ask you to send a document, you shouldn’t send it in works, or word, you should convert it to wordpad unless they specify somthing else. I agree that DivX is wide-spread but many many non-geeks haven’t heard of it and even some geeks. And the people we are submitting it to probably haven’t heard of it either. My point being it isn’t a pre-installed codec, so I would contact them ahead of time. They might even say “Okay, but re send it compressed under a different codec”.
I hope they don’t DQ you. We have DivX version but it was only for our own purposes. My friends were argueing over the copyright rule that FIRST put in place vs. the free music use laws. I said it is just better to go with the safest route. They also wanted to put it in other formats such as QuickTime, but I said that it is just better to go with what you know will be on their computers due to past year and not have to worry about any technical difficulties. The Judging is based on content, the extra compression you’re going to get shouldn’t make the difference in being awared something or not.
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