Friday 2 March 2007

quicktime - animators best friend

i often see people uploading anims as xvid or divx in a rar file
thats ultra cumbersome and has a lot of disadvantages compared to

quicktime is THE video tool for animators
its pretty much the only video tool out there that lets you
- loop seamlessly
- frame by frame the animation (back and forth)
- play and loop selected segment only
- loads of plugins to support differnt video formats
- frame by frame on DVDs (with the mpeg2 component)

- basic video file editing functionality
(
cutting, copy paste segments, overlay 2 vids(adding frame count))
- export to pretty much every format - small filesize

but there are some things that are still not perfect
like resizing you always need a calc to downsize it proportionally
cant just say 480 pixels wide and it does the rest

pc version is compared to the mac version rather inferior
like no batch export
crashing (at least on my pc)


when exporting the animation for web i would suggest
sorensen 3 - 50% quality
AAC 32.000khz mono 32kbit/s
streamable
that will result in
very small filesize
very fast export
very good frame by frame performance (h264 is slow frame by framing backwards)

if you want the file to be ultra compatible (showreel)
mpg 2 is the very best option
there is a mpg2 plugin for quicktime (mpeg2 component)
a lot of companies wont allow people to install codecs or video apps
an mpeg 2 video file though can be opened on pretty much EVERY computer on this planet

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