Well, at the moment it looks like we are favoring allowing any kind of digital animation – which includes scanned drawings, or stop motion, or whatever. Since we are considering allowing different styles of animation, then I don’t think dictating frames-per-second is necessary. The animation will look okay at the fps the artist chose, or it won’t.
I like the 640x480 idea because details should still be very visible… But, fluffybunny’s idea of 480x360 isn’t bad either. I think that does hit a nice compromise.
I absolutely agree that formats are important. I would recommend the following for consideration:Quicktime – can you use different codecs? I’m not overly familiar with QT, but at home have never had a problem viewing .MOV files and have been really happy about that.
Windows Media – I’ve used WMV for compression and have been very happy with the results. The files are small, and as far as I’ve been able to tell viewable by anyone with Windows Media Player who tried to look at them. You can use different settings, we should identify what we expect for animation videos in our challenges.
Flash – this is a very common animation file type, and should be allowed. We need to decide what version player needs to be targeted when the SWF file is for use in these animation challenges.
Once we’ve agreed on formats, I think putting together an overview, or tutorial, on properly encoding animations for these challenges would be a useful tool.
Other useful tools would include animation resources. A good starting place for these resources is the animation forums here on CGTalk:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=26
This forum seems to have a lot of discussion on 3D techniques, but there is also discussion of 2D animation as well. Good stuff.
In the past it looks like the animations were not hosted here on CGTalk. So, where can they be hosted? There are a lot of free options out there, and I have a large chunk of webspace where I would be willing to host animations for others. Any other thoughts on this?
Finally, what kind of information should be included with each entry? My suggestions are:Time to finish (in days, weeks, or hours if you are REALLY fast)
Software used (all packages)
Encoding information (you never know when this is useful information)
Keeping sample parts of work as you progress is a good idea, too. I’m sure a lot of great walk throughs could be written up, and having these partial steps available will only make these kinds of write-ups easier to do. Not that a howto is required, but some people like to contribute them.
assign jobs/positions. put someone in charge of rules, someone in charge of topics, someone in charge of setting up voting threads, etc. i’ll use the rules as an example, that way if one person is in charge of the rules, they set up the rules based on whats been loosely agreed upon, then if changes are required, they can pm’ed and organised by woevers in charge. any of that make any sense? i’m not a natural born leader by any stretch of the imagination, but i’m totally happy if anyone wants me to take care of an aspect of all this