Rendering file to fit on cd - format suggestions?

steveh wrote on 6/1/2001, 1:15 PM

I'm rendering a 15minute project consisting of still photos and music that I need to put onto a CD-R and distribute to others for playback on their machines. My three concerns are:
(1) Size - has to fit in under 700meg
(2) Quality - want 720x480 and at least 15fps
(3) Compatability - need it to play on 486 and up. Don't think mac compatability is necessary, but wouldn't hurt.

From the postings I guess I can rule out MPEG-2, since VF apparently doesn't generate a 'standard' MPEG-2 file. I toyed with QuickTime 5.0, figuring I could include the 10meg freeware player on the CD, but I rendered a 30 second video and it was 1 gig in size! Unless I really screwed up, this would not handle the size limitations.
How about MPEG-1 or compressed AVI?
I've already rendered it in AVI for outputting to VCR - that was just under 4 gigs. The quality was fine.
My system is an Athlon 1.3Ghz, 256meg, 60Gig, ATI All-In-Wonder 128 pro card (non digital video...).
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Steve

Comments

SonyEPM wrote on 6/1/2001, 2:12 PM

MPEG1 should fit and works on most systems with WMP or QT player.

mikkie wrote on 6/4/2001, 12:58 PM

Hi

I've done a bit of this, and using the winmedia or real media formats works pretty well, plus I think the winmedia encoder has a few profiles that might fit your purpose well.

The only potential problem I see is that if you want to encode at full size, winmedia can hit the CPU pretty hard, meaning problems for the 486, though the file size difference from something like 320 x 240 is almost negligable.

To fight this problem I usually encode at the smaller size, letting the graphics card blow it up to whatever viewing size desired -- this gives me a pretty nice picture on a K62 400 laptop, which is the slowest machine I've tried it on. At either size, I generally encode an hour's worth at a bitrate around 1500 for a file size in the 640 meg range, meaning you shouldn't have any problem what-so-ever meeting your requirements.

I should also note that the winmedia player codecs 7 & 8 are available in packages that can be installed on older machines without having to install winmedia player 7, or now 7.1.

One potential problem I see in using mpeg1 is that each system it's viewed on might have to have that mpeg1 codec installed. RE; mpeg2, the latest stuff from Ligos seems greatly improved... I've only just started playing around with it, but it might also provide an alternative.

A good way to do it might be to encode to mpeg2 for the desired file size etc., though here you may want to stay at the smaller frame size, and then use SpruceUp to create a mini DVD. Spruceup will also install a free DVD player that resides only on the CD, meaning anything intel based should not have install anything to play it; MAC's would need their own DVD player.

hope this helps
mike