i plan to do a promotion cd for one medical supplies company. there will be animations wraped up in a director projector. any idea which codec should i use? animatons will be made in max 4.2 with final render (after update to 1.3 it works pretty well), and i can post-work them in premiere or after effects. do you have some experience with director projectors and codecs from max? thanks a lot! :)

I would suggest rendering them uncompressed from max, and then apply your codec in Premiere, means that if the animation starts getting blocky from the codec you don't have to re-render again. Depending on your exact content there are a various number of different codecs you can use. The main thing to remember is the data rate - don't make it too high or the cd drive won't be able to keep up. Director can handle both movs and avis with ease, so it'll just be a matter of experimenting with different codecs to find the right look - there is no quick and easy solution for codecs - it just requires a lot of experimentation.

2nd that on doing uncompressed in Max. If for some reason you can't, I commonly use indeo 5.1 with NO compression, which still gives a good 50% reduction in size. As to the final product, unless you know EXACTLY what equipment it'll be showing on, I would suggest you do 2 versions on the same CD: 1 version for PC users, probably in MPG-1 format, and another for the other guys, in a quicktime .mov format. For my personal stuff, i have a lot of faith in wme / asf format; compression almost as good as DivX, and pretty much anyone with IE4 or better can see them.

Harddrives are cheap these days, and so are cd-r's. Time to burn all your mp3's, pr0n and divx movies and clear out the 10 gigs or so that you'll need for your uncompresed frames. You might also look at one of the lossless mjpeg codecs; lossless means that you dont get compression artifacts and still get some compression.

If you use QuickTime with Director, you have to include a QuickTime installer. No problem, they can be freely gotten and distributed and run in/through Director. I've found xtras for Director that would enable it to play MPEGs but I havn't used any of them. I know those who use them regularly and they seem to work out great. I don't believe Director will handle .wmf or .asf files. I belive that even PCs require an extra codec to play DivX. Therefore I'd hesitate to use a DivX encoded AVI. When I'm doing business to Business CDs, I usually use an AVI movie with the cinepak compressor. It doesn't require installing anything extra and and works for both Mac and Windows. It doesn't look the greatest but it works. If I was doing a CD for consumers I'd use QuickTime. They don't usually have to get permission from their IT department to install something [grin].

thanks guys (gals?)! it was all very helpfull and i think that indeo is indeed best bet... we'll see how much reduction it can stand!

If you can, render full-sized uncompressed files from Max.

--Compression seems to work better when it has more original pixels to calculate with.

Then test the compression at different settings (even codecs) to find the best mix of quality vs. file size.

--Picture quality can vary greatly depending on the what is actually shown. Test, test, test!

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