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hamz
05-16-2006, 01:15 PM
Hi Guys - hopefully you can help me. I've been racking my brains tryna sort my demo reel file size down.

my original reel was 5minutes long - i know thats way too long - its now been cut down to 3mins.

It was composited in combustion using TGA sequences, TGA stills and one grey background.
Only the opacity settings are animated to create transitions - im still very new to combustion so havent figured out how to create propper transitions with clips.

i rendered the reel at normal pal resolution - 768x576
i compressed it using sorensen3 with a meduim setting. Data rate: 75kb/s With a keyframe every 75 frames.
Granted im no expert on compression settings.
The audio file is 4mb - mono - it was also compressed with the reel.

The file size turned out to be 468mb!!! WTF! - taking 11hours 57minutes to render!

ive been up all night tryna get this done. At the end had to render a reel at 400x300
which came up to 97mb.

id still like to get it down to 60mb at 768x576.

you can downlaod my "small" reel here:

http://www.hdbutt.co.uk/demo_reel_small.rar (http://www.hdbutt.co.uk/demo_reel_small.rar)

as you can tell by the tone of this post - im pretty depressed - all the hard work and your screwed coz of the compression settings.


ive been doing some tests that last 50frames.

1 - sorensen3 - medium setting - data rate:300kbs = 2.53mb

2 - cinepak - medium setting - data rate:300kb/s = 4.1mb

3 - H.264 - high setting (medium was rubbish) - data rate: 300kb/s = 2.19mb

rendered at 768x576


please help - in laymans terms - my brains just exploded.

Hamz.
Protean
05-16-2006, 01:21 PM
Others might quote me wrong but... In my experience programs like combustion and premier pro (and probably others) aren't very good at compression to size ratio. You would be better off outputting an uncompressed movie and then compressing it with a dedicated compression package of your choice, be it DivX, Quicktime, nero Recode.... etc.
neogeo51
05-17-2006, 10:56 AM
Try rendering out a Quicktime Uncompressed or with the Animation Codec.
For encoding I would suggest to use Sorenson Squeeze if you want want to use the sorenson codec. A second solution would be Autodesk Cleaner, but you still have to buy the Pro version of the sorenson codec.

Combustion is able to render out quicktime streaming files, but sorenson squeeze for example
uses the pro version of the sorenson codec with two pass encoding which improves quality a lot with transitions and fast camera movements. If you want to embed the reel into a website I would recommend to encode it to a smaller framesize like 360 x 288.
Hope that helps.
lazzhar
05-17-2006, 12:40 PM
Others might quote me wrong but... In my experience programs like combustion and premier pro (and probably others) aren't very good at compression to size ratio. You would be better off outputting an uncompressed movie and then compressing it with a dedicated compression package of your choice, be it DivX, Quicktime, nero Recode.... etc.

For this I'd quote you right ! I would never render to any codec dedicated to render small files using Combustion.
thatoneguy
05-17-2006, 05:21 PM
Combustion is much better than either Avid or FCP at compressing from my experience. However, I've never figured out how to get a small sorenson squeeze file anywhere, so that's not just you.

If your distribution allows it I would recommend Xvid. Combustion handles it splendidly.
hamz
05-17-2006, 07:42 PM
hi guys


thanks very much for your posts.
i'll try out all your tips and see if it works.

im thinking that compressing in combustion may not be suitable for getting a small file size. what about other compositing programmes like premiere/after fx?

thanks again

hamz.
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