I’ve been asked to produce a 5.7 mile drive through a model of the proposed development. No materials (just color), the client wants to know what can be seen from the road. My calculations at 30 frames/second came to 455 sec. (approx. 13600 frames) at 45 MPH. Until now I played with short and simple animations – this one seems to me humongous. I wonder if this can be rendered on a single VIZ station? I will output it to images (png or jpg?) and assemble into an animation afterwards.
Can I do it in one take in the RAM player or I need to make few animations and put them together in some other video editing program (no experience whatsoever…)?
Will such a long animation load on client’s computer?
Is it possible to output into any other, more compressed, format than avi?  Can somebody advise me if there are any pitfalls and, if yes, how can I avoid them?
What would be a minimum, but presentable, resolution for a project like this?

Thanks,

Ewa

You can do it on one workstation, but it’ll be out of action for a good while, for example at 10sec per frame, you’re talking nearly 40 computer hours.

What you suggest is a good idea, render to individual frames (png is better as it’s not lossy) and recompile in Premiere or something like that.  AVI is still a good format, as there are zillions of codecs to choose from, all of which seem to offer something different. Unfortunately I can’t advise on codecs as I’m still figuring that one out myself. I’d suggest not going for anything too exotic though, as you need to be sure it’ll play on your client’s pc.

I wouldn’t worry about the length, 455 seconds is about 7minutes, which should easily compile into less than 250Mb at a decent quality.  I set my resolution at standard dvd resolution (720x576 PAL or 720x480NTSC) in case you wish to burn the result to dvd for maximum compatability.

To give your workstation a break, perhaps consider rendering in batches.

For added realism, consider varying the speed, after all most sensible people don’t travel through junctions at 45mph :) - though this may add to the render time, I don’t think you’re stretching things too far with what you’re doing.

This will save me a lot of worry. Besides basics of animation I am not really experienced and didn’t know what is the reasonable size.
As for the subject of compression I ran tests on 60 frames with all the available options for both avi and mov files and Cinepak Codec by Radius still came first, as the smallest file size with decent quality.
Thank you very much.