compressing image sequence

[joyceanblue]

hi guys this is my first post so i hope im not breaking any rules.
im a 3d artist and usually my animation output is in image sequence (tga or jpeg, i hope that much im doing fine) my problem is that i cant find any right way to compress it, no matter what thre is a significant quality loss. (i use ulead media studio pro6 for compositing) ive tried making uncompressed avi files and then compressing them in tmpeg and virtualdub but quality was nowhere near the image sequence.
usually the animation duration is between 5 to 10mins so im not too concerned with size either.

[edDV]

hi guys this is my first post so i hope im not breaking any rules.
im a 3d artist and usually my animation output is in image sequence (tga or jpeg, i hope that much im doing fine) my problem is that i cant find any right way to compress it, no matter what thre is a significant quality loss. (i use ulead media studio pro6 for compositing) ive tried making uncompressed avi files and then compressing them in tmpeg and virtualdub but quality was nowhere near the image sequence.
usually the animation duration is between 5 to 10mins so im not too concerned with size either.

Products like Premiere Pro import TIF or TGA sequences and auto downsize into your project video format spec. I'd be surprised if Media Studio Pro didn't have a way to do this.

[celtic_druid]

VirtualDub can open image sequences directly. So can AVISynth.

[guns1inger]

Assuming you are rendering at full D1 resolution for DVD, 5 - 10 minute animations should be encoded CBR at the maximum allowable bitrate. An uncompressed avi should look identical to the originals. If it doesn't then you are doing something wrong.

Are you rendering for progressive or interlaced display ?
Are you rendering to a template or an arbitrary rsolution ?

Never, ever render directly to jpeg. The compression will guarantee that you don't get consistent quality as the compression artifacts will vary from image to image.

[joyceanblue]

im rendering at 640x480 resolution. i cant afford 720x480 as it would take too long to render. i know this resolution isnt that high but it serves my purpose. when i watch the image sequence in 3dsmax's ram player the quality is satisfactory, the uncompressed avi is fine quality too though choppy but i cant give an uncompressed avi to a client their computer wont play it smooth.
if somehow there is a way that the final animation would look as good as the image sequence in 3dsmax's ram player.
youre right abt jpg quality even at max quality its not good enough, i use tga most of the time.

[guns1inger]

Uncompressed being choppy is simply a matter of grunt. You should be able to get very close to the same quality using Divx at a high enough bitrate - I'd start at around 2000kbps and see how it looks.