Can anyone explain to me the various compression techniques and how to use them? I come here constantly and see animations by others that are fairly long, well animated and download at a decent 6mbs or so... I make movies (avi's and quicktime's) and am lucky if my first 10 seconds don't end up being well over 20mbs! I am currently working on an animated movie (bryce and poser - thus my obvious absense from posting images as of late) and would LOVE to show it for free here...or at least the trailer for it..but the trailer alone is clocking in at about 26.6mbs! Is this common? I created the clips in bryce and poser and did so with no compression..I then combined them in Premiere5.1a and allowed it to do it's thing as far as compression. Now I've tried the different options..but maybe I'm not doing it right..but I can't seem to find the proper balance for a good image / file size. Any one know if 26.6 is normal for a compressed movie trailer of about 32 seconds or am I going about it all wrong? A walkthrough would be awesome I'm using stereo for the music, all created (or mixed) by myself (if that makes a difference) Thanks again PAN~ (If someone manages to actually help me out here..the winner will get first dibs on seeing the compressed trailer - provided they actually help me achieve compression levels that would allow me to send it to them!)

Compression options are one factor. The pixel size of the image is linearly related to the file size. If you are generating a size of 600X800 or more you will make a very large file. Also consider the color depth. 256 (8bit) is usually good enough. Moving to 16 bit, true color (16M colors) causes big increases in file size. The sound track can be reduced a lot by converting it to mono and reducing the fidelity (if you are willing to give up the fidelity. You may want to consider output in MPEG format because of its high compression and relatively low loss of quality. Finally, you may be able to reduce the frame rate (frames per second) to reduce the size. Again this will affect quality but worth playing around with. tmech

First of all the screen resolution you use should be around 352x240, that's MPEG1 standard. Render to uncompressed AVI (this will be huge), then convert the final edit of your film to MPEG with this: http://www.mnsi.net/~jschlic1/avi2mpg1/avi2mpg1.htm This is a DOS program with a Windows GUI add-on. The final result should be managable. -Jeff H.

Lecblue has a good reference on this subject: http://www.mindspring.com/~lecblue/poser/video.htm.

Thanks you all I'm trying to get a movie done...it should be pretty cool if I could ever make it a decent size for others to view.... I will definitely look into those.. -3-, I tried viewing your last posted movie but I couldn't get it to run..do I need to PURCHASE Realplayer G2? or is there someway of downloading a viewer? Also how did you make your movies that way? I have premiere 5.1a but am unsure as to how to make movies as MPEGS and RPG2's etc. I only see options to export as quicktimes or video-ah-majigs...help!!

There are encoders you can use to convert AVI's to mpg or G2. Follow the link Jeff posted above for a free mpg encoder or you can find the G2 player and encoder (called G2 producer) realmedia.com. My preference is mpg...it dramatically reduces the size of an uncompressed AVI with virtually no quality loss. I hate G2 with a passion...the resulting filesizes may be smaller than mpg, but the archiving created in compression is untolerable in my book. If there are any subtle movements in your movie, they will be lossed in G2 format. -JKeller

I found out recently from Bob O'Donnel that DVD Video is fully dependent upon the MPEG2 Format. If you have any intention of making motion pictures or shorts, you might want to familiarize yourself with this standard, so your stuff could play easily on any DVD Player (Assuming DVD Writers are standardized soon...)

Question everyone, I was looking into the different "methods" as you have all stated..(thanks -3-, I will try and email you and perhaps you can send me a link or two if the offer still stands..) and I noticed in premiere it had an option of "Motion Jpeg blah blah blah" or something to that effect...was that the full name for MJPEG? is that what I needed to pick? Up until now I've been saving stuff as Quicktimes...after having rendered as full uncompressed avi's then editing in premiere...and finally finalizing as a quicktime...however I'm still confused as to just HOW to make them an MJPEG or MP3 or etc...call me a baffoon but I just wish someone could write a tutorial or walkthrough on this.....I visited that other site and while it was helpful (see link above) I found it didn't really tell me HOW to do them...just about each one. It would be cool if someone could just be like "INDEO Codec - use this when blah blah blah...best if you wish to blah blah blah" "Microsoft-1 avi - use this when blah blah blah...best if you wish to blah blah blah" etc.....this would make it so much easier..because frankly I'm hearing all these things about mpegs and Realplayers and G2's and codecs and ...frankly I can't TAKE any more confusion...ackkkk! I'm working on a movie I would LOVE to have others give their opinions on...but as it is....the first minute and a half is already a full 80mbs when it's zipped. I couldn't imagine someone trying to download THAT off the forum... PAN~ Hoping to be the poser forum's "Quinton Tarrontino" (unless I mispelled that and then I am just hoping to be that funny guy with the big forehead..you know Mr. Pulp Fiction...only I don't want to look like that...I just want to be an independant filmmaker....but not in hollywood...just in my own lil' circle...you know like..eh...I'll shut up now.

In order for people to be able to watch your movies, they must have the same codec on their computer that you used to compress the movie. Discussions about "which is the best compression codec" are futile if you want a lot of people to be able to see your stuff. Unfortunately, you'll have to use the older, less efficient codecs in order to have the widest audience. The two best options for quality WITH the most compatibility would be AVI with cinepak compression or Quicktime with cinepak. Sorenson, the comression method for Quicktime 3 and soronson 2 for Quicktime 4 are much better, but less people will be able to see it; you have to have Quicktime 3 or 4 installed. The best compressors of all are Mpeg2 and Bink. To use Mpeg to (and to view it) you have to go out and buy a software compressor. I have DVMPEG which plugs into Premiere and certain 3D apps and allows you to save a file as an MPEG1 or MPEG2 instead of AVI. Bink (www.radgametools.com) is free and extremely good. It is perceptively lossless (It looks damn amazing actually!) yet it compresses the hell out of a file! I took a 1.3 GIG uncompressed avi and turned it into a 7 mg Bink file. It plays smoothly on my computer and it looks as good as the uncompressed version. Bink is an application (windows only so far)so you just open it, pick an avi to compress, and hit the big button that says, "Bink it!" Several hours later, you've got a movie. Yeah, that's the trade off; it takes forever for it to do all of it's math. Hope this helps, Chris