I've attempted a few animations, simple ones, in P5. When they are completed, and rendering them puppies takes a loooong time, the end result is always pixellated....it just looks planily terrible. This is what I am doing...setting up the animation. I render to render settings....usually Firefly production..or even default.... I render full size...640x480 ... or half. I save as AVI with the codec usually microsoft video 1..75%.. or divx5.1 when its completed and pops up in media player, it looks like crap... what settings do you animators use? Should I set the compression quality number higher or lower to improve quality?

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The number is usually higher for better quality, the microsoft codec is not too good but the divx one should be good. The microsoft and cinepak codecs make your animations pixellated whatever you do. Setting keyframes in the codec can improve the quality.

I would render with P4 render settings, or P5 in draft. At small image sizes the production settings are not going to show a great difference, you simply do not have enough pixels to work with. (unless you are dioing extreme closeups.) Make sure you have antialiasing on.

Or you can go ahead and put to png with/alpha if you need it - and then use quicktime/flash/whatever movie program to bring the frames in and then add audio if needed.

I make many animations and the above are my favs. Just make sure whatever program you bring frames into is the same frame rate as your sound file (or use streaming if for web).

Message edited on: 01/30/2005 11:55

While DivX is a great codec, it's aimed at heavy compression which means it can be very lossy, causing the pixelation. I'd say render as a sequence of individual frames, then use a free proggie like VirtualDub to combine the frames into a vid. That way you can try out all the different codecs and settings without having to render again every time.

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I render to stills, then combine everything in paintshop pro's animation shop. What I like about that is it retains it's quality (seems to) and I can retime it a little in the paintshop's proggy a tad.

i'll try images... in PSP...so you save as animated gif ? by the way...i just downloaded virtualdub..thanks for that :)

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854

Attached Link: http://www.gromada.com/download.html

In paint shop pro version 7 and 8 you can save avi files using the animation shop program. Videomach is a good program for editing or making avi files with or without sound. A demo is available at the link.

Message edited on: 01/31/2005 05:48

My basic rule is to render out either individual frames or uncompressed AVI and only apply compression at the end of the editing process. Just like with movie film, a (compressed) copy of a (compressed) copy loses quality every time you process it. If you're out of cash from buying new Poser stuff and can't afford Animation Master, google "Dogwaffle". It has a free version that assembles an AVI from a sequence of TGA frames, and lets you paint a variety of artistic effects - fractal brushes particularly - frame by frame on to the footage, before rendering out to AVI. With sufficient tinkering, you can do some very basic compositing with this prog as well.

speaking of compositing and stuff... I think Premiere can do all that..layering sound, etc... but is there a much less expensive video editing software that has layering, sound editing, and so forth???

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854