Basically I’m looking for a lazy man’s way out of doing things the hard way, with the results of a high paying studio. ;D
I’ve completed a cartoon that, due to the number of copied drawings (of corn stalks) in each scene, works better as a quicktime than as a .swf. Or so it seems. Trouble is, the .mov is not as high a quality as I’d like to see this 'toon in–it looses quality, I have to shrink it, and it’s still a huge file at 12 Mb for not quite three minutes.
Not to mention I’m not too skilled with Quicktime.
In my cartoons up to this point I’ve made everything work as .swf with loader screens. I’d like to keep that up.
I think there must be a way to cheat the system, like importing parts of the scene to one layer (maintain composition instead of layers) and clearing keyframes for those non-moving items, then importing other moving stuff to other layers.
Anyone have experience with this? I think my cartoon would look better as a flash, but in some of the camera moves it gets pretty stilted due to the number of corn stalk copies.
Check it out and you’ll see what I’m talking about. This one moves smooth as quicktime, but has low quality.There are two scenes (corn growing and the reveal shot at the end) that do pretty poorly as a .swf.
http://www.cartoonthunder.com/animation/farmingWeb03.mov
That’s a very nice movie with an excellent soundtrack
and a marvellous voiceover.
The whole storyline just feels good and relaxed.
(Of course if one owns a few such “gas-guzzlers”
One has to think about “alternatives”).
Anyway:
Try codec H.264 (QuickTime 7)
Quality Medium
Size 320 x 240
Sound IMA 4:1 / 24.000 kHz / Mono
I presume your file-size might even go below 4 MB.
Try Sorenson 3 with the same settings and you might
end up with just over 4 MB.
For settings in .swf I am to inexperienced.
Cheers
Nolan
Thanks very much! Dunno if I already said it or not, but that’s my voice and a friend of mine on the guitar.
Finally, I said, heck with it. let’s try it as a .swf anyway.
Still not so hot where the camera moves are, but otherwise twice as happy looking.
And much smaller at only a meg instead of almost 13 megs
http://www.cartoonthunder.com/animation/FarmingForFuel.html
Well, One MB in the Flash-version, that’s pretty small,
I presume QuickTime can’t beat that…
but the .swf-version is fairly “choppy” at least here on my system,
in some places I even find the images to “sharp and crisp”.
(One could even imagine to see some “pimples” on Mr. McDonalds impeccable face).
By far not as “smooth” as the QuickTime-version –
the growing of the corn, the guy walking through it ,
waving goodbye, have lost a little of its appeal.
(Of course everything lays in the eye of the beholder).
Cheers
Nolan
@rob
eventually i’ve found some time to examine the case a bit.
first of all: a good story with a slight suspense, a compact and really professional execution at a right pace. a good film. and the music information at the end is hilarious 
as for the qt: as i see, you’ve used a h.263 with mono sound at 20.050 khz and a 320x240 resolution.
try to experiment with other video compressions, it’s the only possibility to reduce the file size. i’ve also heard that sorenson3 is a good choice, but you presumably won’t go smaller than 5-6mb.
but:
the qt movie is a 320x240, while the flash is double in size (640x480). no wonder the animation looks choppy. and for me the image quality is way better in flash.
maybe export the flash at the same resolution as the qt and see the difference. in my opinion flash is a much better choice.
cheers,
rob
Rob Campbell, did you duplicate your corn images or clone them? I believe that cloning is the preferred method of minimizing file size. Just a thought -JK
I think you’re onto something there…
I don’t actually remember. And it varied. I’m starting to use clone more than duplicate, but this is after I’ve put all those corn stalks in there. I know I dragged 'em from the library a lot–is that akin to cloning?
I’m likely to take out the pull back shots and just use the end shot of each of those, just to smooth the action.
I’ll also continue to mess with QT. I’ve heard both opinions: “something about web video and a little blur” as well as “nice and clean vector images”. As usual, there is no balance. :-\