Best way to combine 3ds animations with Flash?

[ncasler]

Hi all, I've got a project where I need to combine 3ds animations done by an animator with some Flash animation I'm doing. I need to add some labeling and fade from the videos into the Flash animations and back out again, and sometimes I need to display both at the same time on the same screen, so I need to keep them together. Ultimately, this will be a CD presentation that will sometimes be displayed on a plasma screen, sometimes viewed interactively by single users on a laptop/desktop PC. The animations are all less than 20 seconds each, set up for 1920x1080, based on the recommendation of my video-literate coworker, who thinks that will make the animations look nice on a large plasma screen. My animator is providing compressed avi, although we also tried uncompressed avi with basically the same result: rough, pixelating with lots of color shifting. I first tried embedded the movies, then streaming them locally, but still the 3ds animations look rough. I'm not a video person, so I'm not sure of the best way to approach this project....any hints will be greatly appreciated!

[layerburn]

I work almost exclusively with 3d animations brought into Flash with very good results. I believe it's going to depend on what settings you are using. I usually have everything cranked way up. The video codecs you are using are also going to effect your quality.

What you'll want to do is have your animator give you the highest quality uncompressed video as he can. I usually ask for quicktimes because those hold the quality well. You don't want him to give you already compressed videos because when you're bringing them into flash, flash is compressing the video, therefore you don't want to be doing it to video that is already compressed.

Whether you embed the video vs. externally linking will just depend on your project size restrictions. Either way, it shouldn't effect your video quality. The quality will depend on the encoding settings you go with when you go through the import/video under file. Now again I always crank things up because we work with very high quality 3d animations in flash. I usualy go with High Quality (700kbps) and use the On2VP6 video codec. These are the default settings which have given me very nice results thus far. If these don't work for you then you might try another program like cleaner that will offer more video codecs for you to play with.

I really believe it comes down to trial and error with video quality. I hope this helps. I don't know what else there is that you could check unless you wanted to put up one of your videos for me to play with. But you shouldn't have much trouble if you try out some of the suggestions I mentioned.

good luck

[ncasler]

I appreicate the great advice. I actually found a former co-worker who suggested pretty much the same thing. I wasn't sure what I should try, but it sounds like everyone's in agreement that cranking up the bitrate and experimentation is the best approach. Thanks!

[ncasler]

I appreciate the great advice. I actually found a former co-worker who suggested pretty much the same thing. I wasn't sure what I should try, but it sounds like everyone's in agreement that cranking up the bitrate and experimentation is the best approach. Thanks!