From: Jim Lammers To: 3dsmax@engramdigital.com <3dsmax@engramdigital.com>; Mellor Subject: Re: How to get it reeeeelly small? Date: Friday, April 21, 2000 3:04 PM I know how to do it, but you have to be willing to give up the Mac audience. Create your AVI using the MS MPEG4 v1 codec. Set the kb/s setting to 220-250 or so. I usually use the ADPCM for audio also. This is for 30 FPS video at 320x240 with audio at 22KHz mono. I can get very good quality using this approach. I use ULead Media Studio to compact the files because other applications like Premiere have this wierd bug where they reset the kb/s setting of the codec! Typical files sizes work out to about 2.5 MB per minute. So your file would be 7.5 MB total for 3 minutes. I agree that none of the MPEG utilities allow for such low bitrates, even though quality is slightly better than this method. The one drawback of the codec is that I know of no way to make it play on a Mac. There is the very similar free DIVx codec, but if you use that one your viewers will all have to go download and install that too. The MPEG4 v1 codec plays on any system with the latest Media Player installed on it. Jim ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mellor" To: <3dsmax@engramdigital.com> Sent: Friday, April 21, 2000 2:08 PM Subject: Re: How to get it reeeeelly small? There is Media Cleaner Pro which when combined with Sorenson Video will enable you to set keyframe spacing and a data rate cap. The benefit of using Media Cleaner Pro is that you can use Variable Bit Rate to further compress the file. The reults are freat and optimized for Quicktime. VBR is not standard with Sorenson. Many other templates come with MCP but it does cost. Maybe there's a demo download or sumthin'. Lotsa luck. Chris Mellor >Again, thanks to all who have come to my aid about compressing >my 1.5 gig animation (QuickTime) to something more web-friendly. > >I'm still having problems, though. It seems that, in order to have as >many people see my animation as possible, mpeg is the way to go. However, I >spent all day yesterday downloading an incredible number of different >shareware/freeware encoders and none really seem up to the task. > >Either they don't bring the file down enough (down to over 100 meg) >or they leave an ugly watermark in the lower right-hand corner unless >I put up over US$ 200 or something. Some were command line based, >but, because of my ignorance at using such things, didn't work out for me >(did I mention that I'm using a Windows NT 4 machine?). And some >left my animation, not only still prohibitively large, they also left it too >lossy. > >So far, the best I've been able to do is a combination of using Sorensen >QuickTime at a resolution smaller than 320x240 at a "poor" compression >setting--giving me 34,155 bytes--and then compressing it farther using >RAR compression--giving me 19,711 bytes. This is still too large for web >distribution. > >I really want to have my little 3-minute animation critiqued by the list but >I just don't get how so many people can get their animation so small >(at 320x240) for downloading. > >Any other ideas? > >Willi Waizenegger >waizen@earthlink.net > >-- >Subscribe/Unsubscribe at: >http://mail.en gram.net/guest/RemoteListSummary/3DSTUDIOMAX >List courtesy of http://www.Engram.net > -- Subscribe/Unsubscribe at: http://mail.engram.net/guest/RemoteListSummary/3DSTUDIOMAX List courtesy of http://www.Engram.net -- Subscribe/Unsubscribe at: http://mail.engram.net/guest/RemoteListSummary/3DSTUDIOMAX List courtesy of http://www.Engram.net