File Size Question

[Sandra]

Hi all,

I'm just starting a new animation that will be about 2 minutes long that will be incorporated into a Director Project and distributed via installable CD. My experience up until now has been entirely web based Flash stuff. (you know, 100k being way too large and such. lol. )

So the file size issue is totally freaking me out. What is considered a reasonable file size and what would would be considered outrageous? Someone please put me in the ballpark!

Thanks!
Sandra

[Lost Marble]

Are you creating a QuickTime movie for the CD? The file size is going to vary a lot depending on resolution, frame rate, and the codec you choose to use. Some codecs you can instruct to limit the data rate to X number of kilobits per second, so if you have a particular limit, you can force the codec not to exceed that.

I think even for the web, 100k would not be way too large. In fact, for a 2 minute animation, 100k would be incredibly tiny.

As a reference, some of the animations in the Moho gallery are about 2 minutes long. One in particular is 2:30, and the original, good quality QuickTime movie is 6.7 MB. That certainly wouldn't take up much on the CD - whether it's too much to install on your users' hard drives is something you have to answer for yourself.

I don't know the details of the project, but personally, if I was only going to view it once or twice, I'd rather just play it back from the CD than install it on my hard drive. If the project has to be installed, then 6 MB or so doesn't seem outrageous.

[Sandra]

Thanks for the reply!

I'll start looking into all those various formats I can use... (and my web experience has primarily been focused on making web banners and such for ad campagins- with tiny, tiny file size limits... wasn't thinking of doing it for under 100k! )

[LittleFenris]

So the file size issue is totally freaking me out. What is considered a reasonable file size and what would would be considered outrageous? Someone please put me in the ballpark!

Thanks!
Sandra

I would say since its on a CD, as long as it fits on the CD its not too large! You might want to keep filesize down as much as you can since it will be installed on someones harddrive, but other than that, I wouldn't get too anal about size as you have to with Flash web stuff. As LostMarble mentioned, if this is something people are only going to watch once, I wouldn't force the person to install your program just to watch it. I almost always just throw something away if I have to install it and I'm not sure what it is (if this is a mailable, interactive ad on CD type of thing). If it doesn't HAVE to be installed on the person's PC, I would just have it run from the CD.

[nobudget]

For CD presentations use common formats. If the user has to install plug-ins and codecs to watch the CD you've lost them. For a CD project I'd recommend Mpeg1 VideoCD format. Reasonably good video quality, reasonably good compression (+/- 1Mb/100KB p.s.), can be viewed on most computers and is easy on processing power. Also good if you want to add navigation to skip a part, many codecs like windows media and divx buffer a lot so skipping will probably mean missing 5 seconds of video/audio. Hope this all makes some sense.

Good luck,

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

[Sandra]

Yeah, I'd kind of decided to just run with the file size. The installable will include more than just the animated songs- It's a safety lesson (you know, for kids!) that'll have the songs to watch, plus lot's of other fun, safety related activities, so I'm not going to worry too much about the size...

thanks!