Wich format should I choose?

[Barend Onneweer]

I would never master to DV. If you output to MJPEG at a high quality it will be a lot better. If you choose Lossless compression – such as QT Animation @ 100% – you’ll get the best quality.

You could always set up the animation at HD resolution, and preview at half, or even quarter resolution.

Bar3nd

[Steve Roberts]

It’s not a matter of “next level” or not — it’s a matter of final deliverable format.

What is your final deliverable? DV tape? Hard drive playback? Web?

If your final deliverable is DV tape, then render to DV as long as you will be just printing to tape via your editing app, not altering or recompressing the video further.

If you are planning on re-rendering or recompressing the piece, say, in a DVD authoring app, you should follow Barend’s advice and render to the animation codec using the DV/DVD frame size and frame rate. This will give you high quality, allowing your video to survive recompression in the DVD Authoring app.

If your piece is never going to be shown at HD res, then there’s no reason to work in HD res, in my opinion. I only work in the highest res that my piece might be seen at, to avoid the speed hit of working in a frame that’s unnecessarily large.

Steve

[Nicnic]

My output is currently DVD for museum/gallery presentation and DV tape for festivals but I must say I feel these format are quite low for what I do (at least I am shure DVD sucks). I use scanned lead pencil drawings with thin lines and brittle contrasts. Soon HD-DVD will be available or I could consider setting some Hard-drive based presentation… I know these animation will look better on higher resolution…

[Steve Roberts]

You’re limited by the resolution of your delivery platform.

DVD is designed for 720×480 playback at about 30 fps from a disc. As a result, compromises are made regarding image quality. Until HD-DVDs (and players) are available, the best way to squeeze quality out of a DVD is to make sure your source is high-quality (animation codec), then compress to MPEG-2 (it’s necessary) at the highest data rate your player will support. Post at the COW DVD forum for more info.

As for hard drive playback, you can try 640×480 Quicktime Photo-JPEG or Windows Media (WMV). You might be able to make a larger file, but you’re still limited by the speed of the playback device. The average hard drive can only spin and read so fast, so you should test various frame sizes and compression scehems (codecs) until you find something that your presentation hard drive can play back smoothly.

Heck, everything looks better (except talent!) at higher resolution, but as I said, compromises are still necessary due to the speed of the currently available playback devices. RAID arrays can play back HD full-frame, full-rate, but they are expensive. Medea offers a selection.

Anybody else?

Steve