Hi folks,
A really specific question - not sure if this is the forum for it, so apologies if I'm off topic.
I am trying to create an animation movie to be downloaded off the web. [I'm a marine biologist, and the movie is, believe it or not, a simulation of sea slugs crawling around!] I'm trying to find out what codec (for quictime or for .avi) would work best for my purposes. The animation includes just 5 different colours: coloured objects moving on a white background. Conventional codecs (say Indeo or Sorenson) tend to blur the edges of the moving objects because of the way they compress the video. I was wondering if there was a codec that avoided this effect, preserving the crisp edges. Any suggestions?
I know flash may be the way to go (if I can figure out how to convert my raw videos to flash), but I'd prefer to have the regular movie options as well.
I can export the animation as either a series of still image frames or a raw uncompressed .avi for conversion into whatever format is suggested.
TIA, R
Have you tried DivX? In my experience, it does the best job of compression while preserving the image quality. www.divx.com
yes, I use divx alot for other purposes. however, it still has a similar problem (although of course for a similar file size, the quality is much better). it also requires an extra install by the viewer of the web page (as far as I know, it's not someting that Windows MP or Quicktime automatically know how to decode). i'm looking for something that doesn't require that step. h.264 from Apple is similar - fantastic quality but _requires_ Quicktime 7, which excludes anyone not using newer versions of OSX.
if I have to force another codec install, it might as well be for something dedicated to animation... if it exists!
I'm not sure if this is usefull, but I tend to choose sorenson 3 and then use a program call "sorenson squeeze", which is pretty decent at preserving good quality while considerably shrinking file sizes. It can convert video into a variety of formats made for the web.
So if you're on a Mac, you're limited to the Quicktime that comes with the system? Raw deal =O
It was two minutes from download to install for me on XP. The online classes I take require it now and I just can't believe the quality/filesize it churns out.