3D Animation to VCD

[KenWalton]

Has anyone here put animated content that they've rendered themselves onto VCD?

[BJ_M]

yes - but not to often to vcd (mpeg1 ) except for web content ...

[KenWalton]

Ultimately, the content will go to DVD. Right now I just need to give some betas/demos to the client, and the VCD "makes sense" because of the lower render time due to its resolution. If I rendered full D1 I could put it on SVHS, but rendering these interior global illumination scenes at that size results in about 1.5 min per frame, compared to 12 sec for VCD resolution. I'd just like to know the appropriate/optimal render settings (frame rate, pixel aspect ratio) to render to - I'll be encoding in Cleaner afterwards.

Thanks

[BJ_M]

cleaner - with or without the mpeg supercharger - does the worse job of mpeg encoding ive seen (well almost the worse) ... might be why that product has been sold to a lot of different companies ..


non the less - tmpgenc does a excellent job at both mpeg1 and dvd for render animations .. at least from Maya and SoftImage ...

render or convert your output to targa frames - compressed with LZW or uncompressed. render to either full D1 or larger .. or for your test to VCD size - personally i would render to half D1 and make a DVD anyway with 1/2 D1 which plays back very well on a dvd player and still renders fast in your animation program .. then do final renders in D1 or larger

banding can always be a problem so use highest settings for color - you dont need to save alpha.

frame rate for testing is set at 30fps (for dvd you set to 29.97), progessive source and progessive output (its progressive anyway for mpeg1).

for best quality use CBR (only option anyway for mpeg1) @ the max settings for either vcd or if for DVD (and you want it to be more compatable) set CBR to around 7000 - 8000 max

pixel ratio is 1.1:1