I'm currently creating some Bryce/Poser animations and want to burn them to VCD or ,in the nearby future, burn them to DVD. So It has to be broadcast quality.... My questions are these :at what resolution should I render my animations? 800*600 pixels? I live in Europe and there also seems to be a difference between PAL (Europe) and NTSC (US)? What framerate should I use? 24 fps or 30 fps. Is there a difference in framerate between Pal and NTSC? Thanks.... Stardust

Far as I know, same frame rate (30 fps), for NTSC 640 x 480 is common, for PAL 720 x 480 is often used. I have absolutely no idea what you need to burn this to a a DVD, though, at the school where I work we export video through firewire cards (of thru Macs with built in Firewire) to Sony digital tape decks or digital camcorders, these can then export NTSC to a regular VCR. The decks are $3000, incidently, but they are nice, the computer controls 'em (the camcorders too)

thanks for the info jim. I have a Leadtek Nvidea Gforce card with twinview wich enables me to record my animations to my vcr. I experimented abit lately with the resolution. 800600 looked fine but 720480 would also work I think (using PAL). DVD burners are WAY to expensive right now (maybe next year) so I'll burn it to VCD with Nero for now.... again thanks for your reply.... Stardust

NTSC video has a frame rate of 29.97 fps (commonly rounded off to 30); PAL video has a frame rate of 25 fps. When I'm not messing with 3D graphics, I'm messing with home video (I have no social life).

The aspect ratio is different NTSC uses .9 nonsquare pixels. As Little Dragon said the frame rate is 25 fps. I can't recall the resolution but it isn't the DV resolution of 720X480 (Canon XL and GL-1) or 720X486 (Sony). No offense but I think you'd be better off going to DV.com to ask your questions. They are all video heads over there.

NTSC DV = 720x480 NTSC D1 = 720x486 (both at 29.97 fps) NTSC Square pixel is 750x540 PAL D1/DV is 720x576 at 25 fps PAL Square pixel is 786x576 You would use square pixels if your editing app doesn't support non-square pixel ratios (for ex., Premiere 5 DOES NOT support non-square pixels, Premiere 6 DOES), or if you were creating still images for import. Video CD has several different formats and resolutions that you should research before beginning your project. Many set-top DVD players are not compatible with all of the VCD formats.

Incidently, biggest problem with setups like yours is the computer keeping up with the output, 720 x 480 works out to over 1 Mb per frame, you have to do 25 mb each second, most computers can't do it without some kind of hardware MPEG compression, software doesn't cut it. If fact hardware doesn't cut it often, too! The also sell "AV" drives for this kind of stuff, supposidle regular drive do recalibration every so often, and if you happen to be importing or exporting video at that time you drop frames. The firewire - digital video does work pretty good though, Sony is supposed to have a "digital walkman" that I've never seen for about $1000 that will do as a deck. Whole thing is pretty complicated!

NTSC square pixel should be 720x540 (not 750x540)