CompuServe Thread

#Help-Out the New Guy

4 messages in this thread
#12312From: David E. WrightMay 19, 1995 10:39 AM
Hello, Im a relativity new user of Galagari TrueSpace. My company produces components for the Automotive Industry and Ive been attempting to animate an assembly line. Ive been producing my geometry in AutoCAD, outputting the data to DXF, then Importing the data into TrueSpace. The problem Ive been having is that the animation files (AVI / Window 426×341 / Full frames) are absolutely ENORMOUS! Im also a network administrator and I foolishly allowed TrueSpace generate its AVI file to my servers SYS Volume over a weekend. Being that it had nearly 700Mb. available, I thought it was save. That Monday, to my horror I discovered that my SYS Volume had been filled up and my utilization was pegged at 100%. Luckily no problems resulted in this. But, What do I do? Has anyone had out there had any experience writing this data out in other formats or possibly directly to a frame-by-frame video recorder? I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.
#12316From: Ian FirthMay 19, 1995 11:08 AM
David, > (AVI / Window 426×341 / Full frames) are absolutely ENORMOUS! Simple math shows that 426*341 at 24 bit * 30 frames per second works out to 13,073,940 bytes per second…. yes, it gets big fast. AVI's need to be compressed, to save space. If you don't plan on any post-render modifications, select a CODEC (compressor/decompressor) scheme when saving your animation. CinePak, Indeo, RLE and Viedo 1 are the most common, and are available on your system if you installed the 4th disk of trueSpace. CODEC's compress the AVI up to a max of about 2% of original size. Your mileage may vary, but it depends on image size, numbers of frames per second, color depth, and quality desired. Regards, Ian Diversions Software
#12361From: Terry Cotant[RSS]May 19, 1995 9:53 PM
One further note to Ian's very helpful explination: if you chose to use individual .tga's for your animations, lets say to assemble into other programs, or to the PAR for video out, trueSpace will save them in compressed (RLE) format. (trueSpace 1.04 will do this automatically.) trueSpace2 will give you more options, such as .jpg, etc.. Actually that I think about it now, compressing a .tga is redundant when going to a PAR, since the PAR hardware will compress it in it's native scheme. trueSpace2 will give you an option to turn on/off..
#12408From: Ken SmithMay 21, 1995 12:14 AM
David, One other thing that Ian did not mention, is that you would get much better quality buy rendering your animation as full frames uncompressed and then compressing it using Premire, VidEdit, Razor etc. They can also string several small animations together, which makes life a _lot_ easier. Ken