I need some help. I made a 42 second animation using RDS 5.5. The .avi plays fine from my computer but when I burned it to a CD-R disc it plays the movie in slow motion. When I play the movie from the disc the 42 seconds takes about 3 minutes to play. I burned a new disc but the same thing happens. The file is 388,539 KB and takes up about half the CD-R disc. I don't think it's a problem with the CD burner because I have used it to backup past animations onto a CD-R disc. The past files were smaller but I'm beginning to think it's a problem with the file itself.

When I rendered the movie the compression setting was set to 'Full Frames (Uncompressed)'. Should I use a compressor? RDS 5.5 has four chooses: Cinepak Codeo by Radius, Intel Indeo Video R3.2, Microsoft Video 1, and Indeo video 5.04. What's the difference and if I use a compressor can I play the movie in Real Player and Media Player?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Mary

I would suggest that you go to www.divx.com and download one of their codecs. When you install it, it should show up in the compression settings in RDS. I'm not sure if this will help the frame rate, but you'll get a lot smaller file that 388 meg. Hope this helps.

Your computer is trying to play back ALL of the frames, but it can't keep up (VERY few could!) with the frame rate off your CD-ROM drive. So, it plays back what it can, which makes it slower. I would use SOME form of compression for any file I wanted to watch. But, for any files you still want to edit, like compose over a live backround footage, or something, keep a copy for doing those things at full rez un-compressed. Once you compress, you CAN'T go back! NEVER COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE! CD-R's are cheap! Fill them up! DivX is good for Windoze, but others may have problems playing back your files. My 2 cents... :>

It seems that the answer has been covered, but here's my take on it. It's not the file, nor is it your CD-R drive. It's either the speed your CD drive plays back at, or the speed your machine reads the file. I've used RayDream for years (still do, from time to time, though I've ported over to Carrara for the most part), and have produced animations for our TV station ID. I always render out uncompressed frames, knowing full well that it will never play back at full video frame rate (30 or 29.97 fps) on a PC, unless it's rendered into a codec that the machine is designed to handle at that frame rate. But for the station ID stuff, I render it uncompressed and archive it on CD-R's. Then I can take the AVI (huge as it may be) into Premiere, AfterEffects, or over to the Mac for Media 100 or Final Cut Pro, do whatever editing and compositing I want to do, then run it out at full-motion NTSC video speed. Bluetone is right in that once you've compressed a video file, you can never go back. Hope that's helpful. - Dex