hi. i have been trying to work on a main animation for my new website. and what i ened up with is a total mess. i pre-rendered the image, to see how it would turn out. and it looked great. then when i set the animation up, i set it to render each frame, with high compression for qaulity. after rendering the sme 300 frames, i viewed it. it looked so pixelatied, it wasnt funny. the image is blurred and you cant make heads or tails of it... how can i make the animation, look like the rendered image? the animation only has to to be about 30-45 seconds.

hmmm "high compression" and "quality" just don't go together...i think maybe you got it backwards?for high quality you want to turn compression off...most other apps like photoshop,paint shop pro etc do a much better job of compressing images...

You didn't mention what compressor you are using. The divX codec (compressor/decompressor) available at www.divx.com, usually makes good quality image .avi files. QuickTime (the free version is available at www.apple.com) using the Sorenson 3 compressor also does a good job. Both require the end viewer to download something but both formats are already in fairly broad circulation - especially among those who are into movies and animation (your peers). Many of us render the stills at the highest quality we can - uncompressed if HD space permits - so we have one perfect copy of the animation. Then we compress the animation into a movie file using another program. I sometimes try different settings and compress just a short bit of the animation just to test/evaluate the compression. I do it because compression uses mathematical formulas that interpret the changes of data in the image. When there are a lot of changing pixels (like in a rapid pan or blurring in and out) sometimes the compression needs to be adapted to accomodate it. BTW, rodzilla was absolutely correct. High compression (smaller file size) makes the image quality poor. Low compression (larger file size) makes the image better. It's a pain in the butt and you end up having to decide for yourself which combination of size and image quality you're willing to live with. In order to cheat, sometimes you can reduce the frame rate (for example 15 frames per second instead of 30) or make the movie dimensions smaller (for example 320x240 instead of 480x360) to reduce the amount of information in the movie that has to be compressed.

thanx for the imput... i will try a few different settings.. as for 3rd party compression.. i havent gotten that far yet.. i was just trying to get it to render properly in the animation.

I like XviD better than DivX at least the version I have is easier to get good results with than DivX, but not as many people have trhe codec sitting on their machine already.

eek. I've never even heard of XviD. Where do you get it and does it have a Mac version?

It's another MPEG 4 based codec. It's open source unlike DivX so there are many flavors floating around. I dunno if it'll work with macs. It encodes faster than DivX tho, and the results look better. (to my eyes at least)