The results are out and I just want to thank you all for the score you gave
my animation.

I'd also like to thank you for the nice comments. I agree that the story is
somewhat traditional, but it was back to the roots for me anyway, as a kid
I've often drawn comics about jets and ufos fighting in the skies... :-)

As the comments included a a question from Steve Shelby about the encoding
to MPEG, I thought I'd answer it here:
All scenes were initially encoded at 500kbits per second, which already gave
pretty good results with low filesize. The important aspect is the amount of
image-change from frame to frame, so I went through each scene individually
and checked for visual flaws and raised the kbits per second for the
individual scene where it was required, e.g. the first scene with the title
and moving camera required a higher bandwidth to not dissolve into blocks
around the title.

Then, to make the animation as small as possible whilst retaining the
overall quality, I went through each scene and lowered the bandwidth when
there is little camera movement and scene change, for example some of the
Jet's talking scenes are more or less a static camera with a moving ground
and the subtitle. The lowest bandwidth used was 250, but mostly tended to be
around 350 (I always went for steps of the 50kbits range). The highest was
750 for the first scene and some of the more "action-packed" (camera- and
object-movement-wise) scenes.

BTW, the entire animation was rendered to BMP at 320x240 with Antialiasing
Method 2 at depth 1 to 3 (dependant on detail in scene) and requires just
below 1GB filespace (it's BMP, remember? I'm on a Windows System, so BMP is
pretty useful most of the time).

Thanks again, you all made my weekend (and probably the next week along with
it!) :-)

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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