does anybody know an efficient resolution settings and frame-rate setting for viewing on TV. (music video)

I think this has been asked before...do a search on TV resolution or movie resolution. Brian

NTSC (or U.S.) frame rates are 29.96'sh frames per second. PAL format which is European is 24 fps. As for resolution, you will get a different answer from all kinds of people but I think the bottom line would be to render at a width of 640 or higher and also to render in the aspect ratio you choose. For TV, the aspect ratio is 1.3:1 and if you render the width at 740, then the other dimension should be 569. DVD conversion will probably put your final image into the 740 X 440 or 480 realm but will be displayed at 1.3:1 so it will work out. This is not a simple question and there are lots of answers. -Kix

thaks for the response. very helpful -dthrm

Actually, NTSC frame rate is 29.97 fps, but you can render in Carrara or RDS at 30 FPS and your editing system will convert the frame rate (if you're using Premiere, FCP, Media 100, AVID or any of the bigger NLE's). If you're mixing your footage with DV acquired footage -- say Mini-DV, DV-CAM, Digital-8 or the like -- you will likely want to render using non-square pixels (I seem to remember that Carrara has that option, though I don't have it open in front of me at the moment) at a resolution of 720x 480 or 720 x 486. Again, if you render at 640 x 480 (which is American TV's standard aspect ratio in square pixels) and drop the movie onto a Premiere timeline, Premiere will automatically convert it to whatever resolution you're outputting. I use Carrara (and used RDS for years before) to produce broadcast graphics. I always render at 640 x 480 at 30 fps and let my NLE convert it as necessary. Hope that's helpful. - Dex

excellent. thank you. i'm using premiere and i've gotten simmilar feed back from other people. all the info has been useful. -dthrm

i've also heard that another common frame rate is 15/s. will i a significant difference in video quality. also when i rendered (at 24f/s, before i posted the question, the file was absolutely huge and various programs had trouble playing it. 13sec animation was about 1.2gb. the resolution was a bit high, because i didn't look at the render properties after i incresed the resolution to 150 dpi. will returning the resolution back to normal help significantly?

It all depends on the compression algorythm and file format you used to save the file. Again, try to render your animation in terms of actual pixel ratios instead of dpi. -Kix

got it, thanks -dthrm

thank you for the help. i've got everything working nicely now. :) oh and please check out my fist character "torak" in the begginers section. -dthrim

Yep, DPI is more something you consider when rendering for print. 15 fps will look clunky when you burn your final video out to tape or DVD. It's just not got the smoothness of 30 fps.... It's not that the individual frames will look to be of less quality; there will be a herky - jerky feeling to the motion. Kind of like (but not quite as bad as) watching a streamed real media file from the web. You might also have trouble getting Premiere to play the file properly; it may try to convert the 15 fps into 30 (29.97, actually), and then everything will look like fast motion. (I'm not sure about that last bit, though, haven't tried it.) torak looks cool, btw. - Dex

good point. and i did notice a small amount of jerkyness. -dthrm

i tried it at 15fps, a little jerky, i'll try again at 30fps. thank you, kix and dex for the pointers. much help :) -dthrm