Fly through quality

[Anonymous]

I just finished creating two fly throughs to present to a client but I'm concerned about the quality of the playback. These are the first fly throughs I have created so please bear with me. The presentation of these movies is via the internet as a streamed video since the client is currently on vacation, traveling the world. Because of the delivery method, I resized them down by 50% to save on space. I also compressed them as MPEG4-Video to get the file size down, but they are very pixelated and just crappy looking overall. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a good quality fly through that plays for 30 seconds and is under 2 megs in size? Thanks.

[TomWaltz]

what resolution/size are they (to begin with and your reduced), what compression software are you using, and what are your compression settings?

[Link]

Check out the discussion and comparison chart posted here.

Under 2MB?? You may have the best luck with Photo JPEG.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Link. I checked it out and used the Sorenson compression like was suggessted, but it shot my file size up to 35MB. Currently I'm using MPEG-4 Video because I can get the smallest file size, but the quality is lacking. If it didn't have to be online I wouldn't worry about it, but I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Oh well. Thanks for your help.

[TomWaltz]

Are you rendering straight from Archicad to MOV file? That might be part of your problem.

Most professional animation jobs are done frame by frame to a folder full of JPGs, allowing you to render the entire job at once, re-render small parts of it, pick up where you left off from a crash, or even run different frame ranges on multiple machines.

Once you have that series of images, use something like Quicktime Pro ($30) to assemble into a movie. The animation quality is much higher (no pixelation from Archicad's image compression). The downside of Quick Time is that its built-in compression is not great when making this kind of "series of images".

It's a shame, since the new H.264 compression is stunning when it works.... (I reduced a 4.3 GB MOV file to 115 MB with no visible loss of quality)

[Thomas Holm]

TomWaltz wrote:
It's a shame, since the new H.264 compression is stunning when it works.... (I reduced a 4.3 GB MOV file to 115 MB with no visible loss of quality)

Then how did you do that?

[TomWaltz]

I did it on a compiled video with combined CAD animation, live video, animation, and motion grapics assembled in Final Cut Pro, then used Quick Time Pro to reduce the file size.

[Thomas Holm]

Nice, but an expensive tool set. Is it possible to just join the jpgs to a video stream in some cheap ware that does just that, and THEN compress it using QTPro?

[Anonymous]

Could iMovie do the job? Or, for the less fortunate among us, Windows movie maker?

I know you can use both to assemble bunches of jpegs, but not sure how well they compress...

[TomWaltz]

Thomas wrote:
Nice, but an expensive tool set. Is it possible to just join the jpgs to a video stream in some cheap ware that does just that, and THEN compress it using QTPro?

When I tried that, it did not work (I tried it with iMovie and QTPro)... that's when I had to spring for FCP (in the middle of a project, no less....)