Never posted to this forum before, but this is a general question that concerns rendering and creation of animation files. Does anyone know of a good site that describes the pros and cons of each of the different codecs for video compression. I always feel as if I am just guessing. What is the difference between the animation codec and the sorenson video codec? How do you know which settings to use? Thanks johnj

There are a lot aren't there. One thing's for sure whichever you choose someone will moan that they can't see them, usually me! I suppose it depends on your target audience and whether they'll have the codec installed on their computer, which is why I always use Flash or .mpegs for the web.

Attached Link: http://www.webartz.com/fourcc/indexcod.htm

This site has a good list.

Attached Link: http://www.vcdhelp.com/comparison.htm

This may be a little off topic, but the information may be of interest. The link goes to a site concerned with capturing video on a computer and creating VCD, SVCD or DVD disks that can be played. It lists the major video compression standards (MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX, ASF, RM, etc) and provides a table showing things like standard resolution for PAL or NTSC, rough conversions of what a minute of video and audio would be in terms of MB of disk space, and the relative quality of the video image and sound. its also a great site for tools that can be used to edit various computer video formats.

I use the Huffyuv codec on my PC for all of my post-production work. It's a lossless avi codec and is a much better alternative than doing everything without compression. After I'm happy with my edits, I convert to MPEG 1 or 2, or Flash depending on where I'm distributing... There's a lot of good info in Avery Lee's VirtualDub program's help file about video compression. I would read it, and here's some links- Huffyuv- http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html VirtualDub links (codecs and what-not)- http://www186.pair.com/vdub/links