I'm working on an IRTC animation for which I believe about 120 words of
narrative introduction are necessary.  I don't want to put it in the TXT
file I submit, as I would lose some dramatic impact and I know voters
have complained when the entry's theme isn't self-explanatory.

Right now, I've made my text into a bitmap which scrolls up the screen,
and I film it as it travels in the +Y direction.  The problem is that
this part of the animation came out to be nearly 2MB, and it's still
difficult to read as it zips by over 11 seconds.  It's a two-color
bitmap, and I expected much better compression efficiency from the MPG
format.

The text fits legibly onto two 320 x 240 stationary screens. I tried
another MPG which was about 80 frames or more of each screen, but this
was 5 MB!

Any suggestions, technically or IRTC-PC-ally?

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Greg M. Johnson wrote:
> 
> I'm working on an IRTC animation for which I believe about 120 words of
> narrative introduction are necessary.  I don't want to put it in the TXT
> file I submit, as I would lose some dramatic impact and I know voters
> have complained when the entry's theme isn't self-explanatory.
> 
> Right now, I've made my text into a bitmap which scrolls up the screen,
> and I film it as it travels in the +Y direction.  The problem is that
> this part of the animation came out to be nearly 2MB, and it's still
> difficult to read as it zips by over 11 seconds.  It's a two-color
> bitmap, and I expected much better compression efficiency from the MPG
> format.
> 
> The text fits legibly onto two 320 x 240 stationary screens. I tried
> another MPG which was about 80 frames or more of each screen, but this
> was 5 MB!
> 
> Any suggestions, technically or IRTC-PC-ally?

The only thing I have to offer is that you may find that if you turn it into a
full-colour-image with anti-aliased text the compression will be much better.
What you are trying to do will probably work better with AVI.

Remco

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I made a palleted GIF of the text, placed this on a box, and scrolled
the box.  I used POV-Ray to collect a series of TGA's and then compiled
the TGA's as and MPG with CMPEG.

Does your suggestion (full-colour-image with anti-aliased text)  still
offer me hope if I am making TGA images with POV-Ray?   The AVI format
won't do for the IRTC. 

Remco de Korte wrote:

> The only thing I have to offer is that you may find that if you turn it into a
> full-colour-image with anti-aliased text the compression will be much better.
> What you are trying to do will probably work better with AVI.
> 
> Remco

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Greg M. Johnson wrote:
> 
> I made a palleted GIF of the text, placed this on a box, and scrolled
> the box.  I used POV-Ray to collect a series of TGA's and then compiled
> the TGA's as and MPG with CMPEG.
> 
> Does your suggestion (full-colour-image with anti-aliased text)  still
> offer me hope if I am making TGA images with POV-Ray?   The AVI format
> won't do for the IRTC.
> 
I don't know. I just know MPEG has a tendency to blur (to put it mildly) and it
has difficulty with hard edges.
Another point is, that if you scroll the text vertically, you're changing the
whole screen, each frame while actually you just add a little. Perhaps if you
stuck to one line of text, scrolling horizontally or another way to ... Well,
actually that's editing the animation to adapt it to the file-format. 
So, in short (hence my name): I don't know :-)
Sorry,

Remco

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Remco de Korte wrote in message <36913EBD.CABF38DD@xs4all.nl>...
>Greg M. Johnson wrote:
>>
>> I made a palleted GIF of the text, placed this on a box, and scrolled
>> the box.  I used POV-Ray to collect a series of TGA's and then compiled
>> the TGA's as and MPG with CMPEG.
>>
>> Does your suggestion (full-colour-image with anti-aliased text)  still
>> offer me hope if I am making TGA images with POV-Ray?   The AVI format
>> won't do for the IRTC.
>>
>I don't know. I just know MPEG has a tendency to blur (to put it mildly)
and it
>has difficulty with hard edges.
>Another point is, that if you scroll the text vertically, you're changing
the
>whole screen, each frame while actually you just add a little. Perhaps if
you
>stuck to one line of text, scrolling horizontally or another way to ...
Well,
>actually that's editing the animation to adapt it to the file-format.
>So, in short (hence my name): I don't know :-)
>Sorry,
>
>Remco
>
>

Newbie Q:  are you allowed to use sound in the animation?

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Bloomquist Family <lak### [at] emailmsncom> wrote in message
news:36967bfa.0@news.povray.org...

> Newbie Q:  are you allowed to use sound in the animation?

############################

yup.  you can use sound in an animation.  i use fast movie processor
to create the AVI from the sequenced POV bitmaps, then use a
freeware program called DDClip to drag and drop the AVI and
the WAV files i want.  i imagine DDClip is happy with other sound
formats, but thats the one i use...

oh... and if you have a music cd you want to nab a song from, use
WindAC to convert from the cda format to a wav.

good luck, miker

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