What is the most cross platform friendly format for animation and can I get there using Carrara 2? I am not real familiar with PCs, will Quick time work? Thanks, Vern

Hi Vern,

yes Quicktime should be just fine

HAWK999

Thanks a bunch. I have found Carrara to be very useful creating exciting industrial graphics. Now I am trying to branch into animating them too. While I use Apple products, my clients use PCs. They also favor Power Point Presentations. Can Quicktime be used in Power Point? Or what? Thank you, vern

I have ppt with Office98 and you can import Quicktime movies into your presentations and also use image files for slide show presentations and backgrounds. The Powerpoint file can also be exported as HTML for use in web-browsers. You can create slide shows for the HTML version but I'm not sure if you can imbed the movie files within them. Apple has a PowerPoint-like program that can work with existing ppt files. I don't know if you can export as ppt though. I use MacOSX/9 but don't really use powerpoint except to see what it looks like. It's one of those boiler-plate programs that creates content that all look the same. I guess that conformity is its appeal.

Attached Link: http://www.apple.com/keynote/

Thank you, I agree about ppt's limitations, but my clients use it a lot, so I must work within the limitations. I will look into Keynote, that sounds useful. Thanks again, Vern

One thing I've run into in porting QuickTime movies from Macs to PCs - the resource fork thing. I've created QuickTime animations in Macromedia Director MX. Found that I had to get ahold of software that will strip out (or flatten) the extra resource forks Mac OS uses in its file structures. This may be different with Carrara; I don't know. Just thought I'd share the wisdom of three days' pain... :P

Thank you, I am still using 9.1 on my G4, it works so well I am reluctant to go to OS 10. I always experience new system shake down pains. I am running tests with PC clients now and will no doubt find some challanges. vern

I would HIGHLY recomend using a 3rd-party program (cleaner, etc.) to change your QT files into MPEG1 files. MOST PCs will choke on a QT file imbedded in PowerPoint. I do this ALOT, and can tell you that PC PowerPoint DOESN'T like QuickTime. Also, as you create graphics, always use a cross platform file type, like JPG, (worst<) BMP (large but better,) or preferably TIF. Tif supports transparency, and PowerPoint can read that transparency and allow for none square graphics. PNG is even better, as the files will be smaller, and still support transparencies, but you'll need a 3rd-party program (Photoshop etc,) to convert the file since C doesn't support PNG. I hope this helps! :>

Thanks for the info, but I don't understand some of the terms. 1) Whats "cleaner", is that a program and where would I get it? 2) Whats "PNG"? and where do I get it? I use Photoshop a great deal, but have only done illustrations, ad construction and retouching. Tif is my preferred format for export to Quark. It sounds like I can create PNG files (whatever they are) out of Photoshop, correct? thanks, vern

Yep. Just do a "Save As" and select PNG from the menu...

for saving png, gif, jpg files in photoshop, "file: save for web" is the nicest way to compress files.

it allows you to have lots of control over the compression settings. You can look at multiple compression settings simultaneously, and save compression settings.

-pix

GraphicsConverter also has an option to "save for web" (png, tif, jpg. ete, etc, etc) without the Mac Resource Fork info.

Cleaner is a program from Discreet (www.discreet.com) that is made for compressing video files, (animations included) into a variety of different file types, mostly for use on the Web, but also for other reasons, like compressing a QuickTime file into an MPEG-1 file for use in PowerPoint. :> I would agree with pix that the algorythm used in 'save for web' is better then the standard 'save as...' and allows for trying out differnt compression settings, (for JPGs or GIFs) and resizing before the actual save. This can save alot of time and effort to find a setting that works best for the image at hand.