Steve Lareau's Hilltop Design- Animation Tips

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I see these acronyms all the time, but what do they mean?

AVI—Audio Video Interleaved. A Windows format that typically runs video at 15 frames per second (fps) and audio at 11 kiloHertz.

BMP—Bitmap file. Windows bitmap format for still graphics.

JPEG—Joint Photographic Experts Group. An ISO standard for compressing still images. It is not associated with any particular platform.

MOV—A full motion video format typically associated with native QuickTime multimedia.

MP3—MPEG Audio Layer 3. Audio file that compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 12.

MPEG—Motion Pictures Experts Group. An ISO Standard for compressing video at 30 fps and CD quality sound.

TIFF—Tagged Image File Format. Bitmapped graphics file that allows for many compression options, including "none" for lossless quality.

WAV—Windows audio format that can sample up to 44 kiloHertz.

Animation Information

Below are snippets of some emails I exchanged with the late Rodney L'Ongnion of Planetary Traveler fame, as well as the just released Infinity's Child video. This stuff is about video compression settings. It was pretty cool to be able to pick the brain of someone that's done as much as he has done over the years..

I created an animated video with Bryce for Metacreations use, and as I was working in Adobe Premiere, I ran into some glitches in compiling and compressing it. Rodney came to the rescue and helped me over the rough spots. I'm posting this to give others a "rule of thumb" on this stuff. On the sidebar, you'll find some helpful and informative links for QuickTime and other video information. The information below is reposted with Rodney's permission.

Please, keep in mind these conversations were from a few years ago, so some things may have changed since I wrote this out.

32K is a very nonstandard frequency for multimedia. It's more of a lo-fi video standard... like for camcorders and regular mono VHS. Most computer audio I know of is based around the 44.1K CD-Audio standard.

How did the audio come in? Hopefully stereo at 44.1 and 16 bits. If so, leave it at 16 bit sampling if at all possible. 8bit sound is pretty much Telephone transmission quality. The standard practice is halving the frequency as you reduce sound quality... from 44.1 to 22.05 or to 11.025.

I'm sure those numbers sound familiar from poking around in the menus. I try to keep my sound at least at 16 bit 11.025K mono.

< My video is just 240 by 180. >

That's a good low bandwidth size. Did you by any chance render at any higher? Say 320x240? I'll come back to this.

< I need it in QuickTime format, which I've never really messed with much. When I complied what I had, it came out to 277 megs. >

So now you know why I wasn't too overly sympathetic to complaints about my 18Mb 3.5 minute QuickTime. Darn things are pretty unwieldy, huh?

< I just need some advice and guidance for what you set this stuff to, for running on a CD, frame rates, how many fps, quality, etc.... >

Framerate- What rate was the original animation at? You can only efficiently reduce framerates by multiples. Otherwise you either get erratic stepping or the blended frames don't compress well and drive your file size through the roof. Hopefully you rendered at 24fps... allowing you the option of 12fps (my favorite) or 8fps (pretty jerky... realistically unusable unless there's no other alternative). If you rendered at 30fps then you can drop down to 15fps (the standard for most CD-ROM and Internet QuickTime's because most are based on 30fps) or 10fps (jerky but often acceptable).

If you rendered at 15fps.... you're stuck. Not many options for reducing framerate.

The next factor affecting final size is CODEC. I recommend either Cinepak or Sorenson. Cinepak is the most controllable without buying special compression software but you can try Sorenson anyway. They both allow you to set a limit to the data amount. For CD-ROM I've been using 350KpS for the last few years. To get the Infinity's Child demo down to 18Mb I think I had to go down to 90KpS.

For your compressed version, try Cinepak at 350KpS and mono sound at 16 bit 11.025K. If that's over 100Mb then drop down to 200KpS or 150KpS. 50-60Mb for 3 minutes doesn't strike me as unwieldy.

<When an AVI is rendered and compressed, then that compressed animation is edited and saved over and over, does the quality suffer with each save, as it does with
JPEG files?>

Yes. NEVER, render to an AVI. ALWAYS render to sequential frames, compression set to none, and edit with these. Just as with a JPG, it loses information every time you open and save it. If you MUST render to an animation, render to QuickTime, compression setting set to NONE. Save to Cinepak or Sorenson as your last step. If at all possible, really, be smart and render to individual frames. Having individual frames makes any touch ups or fixes to bad frames a much simpler process. It's good to work smart.

As for output settings in Premiere, for your master copy before creating a compressed version, I think you want to create the movie in QuickTime format, I believe the selection is called Animation, with 24 bit, set to millions of colors. All the real heavy compressing codecs save a 24 bit file anyway. All lowering your color depth does is give a much more limited range of colors for them to blend together and create "blotchy" animations.

< Hmm.. this is weird. I just rendered out the final in Sorensen Codec... it cycled every second or so between "normal" and blurred... >

I've seen that happen. I attribute it to the Primitive Sorenson authoring toolset included in the "Free" distributions. Quality and length seem to cause this to pop up every now and then, so I have to assume it's a memory issue with your system. You said last night that the Cinepak version looked just as good as the Sorenson... go with that.

<In Premiere, I finally got the transitions in using the cross dissolve, but on playback, the end of the 1st clip faded gradually and transitioned into the next clip nicely, but the very end frame of the 1st clip "popped" onto the screen for what I guess is the very last frame of the 1st clip as the 2nd clip played on just fine>

The proper way to create a transition in Premiere is to overlap the two pieces of footage and then drop a transition into the space between them. The transition will auto expand to the exact amount of the overlap.

Since this stuff is frame accurate, it is very easy to accidentally nudge the transition out of alignment with the two video clips which is what I think has happened in your case.

What I do as the final adjustment to a Premiere edit before rendering it is to go through and delete the existing transitions and dropping new ones into the timeline. This takes care of the problem and I don't have to be anal about zooming all the way down every time I want to adjust a fade.

Remember- When all else fails, hit the newsgroups! There's a lot of helpful information there, and people are usually willing to lend a hand!

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