best avi codec

#1

I’ve been using cinepak codec by radius which has been ok however is there a beter codec for rendering avi files? Of the ones on my pc, cinepak is the best.

#2

Blah, cinepak always seemed to bled/smudge anything red alot.

XVid is pretty good and free(!), not to mention divx compatible (orwhateveryoucallit). I never really tweaked any settings away from the default but doing that and a preliminary pass should give even better quality and size/quality ratio. Or so I imagine.

http://www.free-codecs.com/

#3

Best thing to do is to render to individual frames and then put together an AVI later. I usually make an uncompressed AVI and then compile a Mpeg2 from that.

CU
Elmar

#4

personally I always use quicktime (after rendering frames) as it allows you to scrub through the movie.

#5

I like XVID. It seems to work pretty good and compresses well too. :slight_smile:

#6

If you are trying to stick to a windows based codec you’ll probablly want to try the windows media 9 encoder, which is a free download from microsoft, just do a search for it and you’ll find it.

Quicktime is nice because you can step through your frames forward and backwards by using the L/R Arrow keys.

Another useful tool is something like ACDSEE which allows you to scroll through single frame renders ( like a sequence of TGAs ) by using the scroll wheel on your mouse. You can also set it up to play a slideshow and set the duration that it plays a frame to something really small, like 1/30th of a second to get an accurate frame rate.

Personally I render out tests straight to quicktime so I can quickly take a look at my progress, then render final animations to tga sequences and check them with ACDSEE. The final output is then determined by the clients needs and typically ends up being either WMV9 or Quicktime or compiled into a DVD.

There are some great other codecs out there as suggested as above, but sometimes it can be a pain to get a client to deal with any codec that doesn’t already exist on their machine.

#7

What program are you using to convert .bmp frames into an avi? I have yet to find a decent one.

#8

Cheers guys, I’ll have a play around with your suggestions.

Thanks.

#9

Try this :-

http://www.virtualdub.org/

#10

or reload them into LW & render to an animation.

How many times has this been discussed?

#11

new year…new discussion!:smiley:

#12

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