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Many artists are starting to place their reels online for easy access for recruiters, now days a well compressed video is very important for download time.

We asked one of our web gurus and artist extraordinaire, Adam Byrne,  to give us his thoughts on how he created his reel online.

How do you compress a demo reel to make it web ready?

There’s a lot of factors to cut down the size of a video. The Sorenson 3 codec is pretty good, almost as tight as DivX, but since it’s built into quicktime it’s a lot more standard. With Sorenson 3, you don’t really have to go any lower than 320 x 240, so it’s still high res enough to see your animation. Next, I cut the framerate to 15 fps. That cuts the file size in half, and doesn’t really hurt the animation noticeably. You can set the quality of Sorenson to 50 or even 25 and still look good. You’ll have to experiment because compression is all subjective to what is being compressed. I also set the keyframing to either 15 or 30 frames, so every second or two it cleans up any compression artifacts. It’s also important to compress your sound. I’ve found that QDesign Music 2 @ 22.050 kHz, 16 bit, Mono, 24 kbps is optimal. It makes the sound take up almost no space, and still sounds decent. Don’t forget to check the “Prepare for Internet Streaming” and set it to Fast Start when you export. This will allow your movie to begin playing immediately as the file loads. As I said before, compression is very subjective, so I like to export a bunch of variations to find the right balance of quality and file size. But typically, those are the settings I use. They are standard in Quicktime 5 Pro.
Video: Sorenson 3, low to medium (25 – 50) quality, 320 x 240, 15 fps, keyframe every 15 or 30 frames, limit data rate to 90 kbps
Audio: QDesign Music 2, 22.050 kHz, 16 bit, mono, 24 kbps. And don’t forget prepare for internet steaming fast start.

Where can i get the tools you used for the video compression and the sound?

I use Quicktime Pro for all of my movie exporting. Some programs like premiere sometimes compress badly under certain circumstances.

Are they compatible with pc and mac?

Yes, Quicktime is always released on PC and Mac simultaneously. The free version doesn’t have exporting tools, it’s a 30$ upgrade.

How easy is the user interface for the programs used?

I find the interface incredibly simple. Open your movie in Quicktime, choose export, click on the options and enter your settings. In addition to Sorenson 3, there are about 30 other codecs/formats that you can export to.

How does Quicktime movies compress video?

Quicktime movies use a variety of codecs to compress the video, from near loss less Photo JPG, to DV for digital video, to web based mpeg4. Anyone who doesn’t have quicktime can download it here http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Oh, and by the way, Quicktime Player becomes Quicktime Pro when you enter the registration code. The Pro features are just disabled in the Player.

How did you get your video into your computer?

I import and dump to video through my digital camcoder. Transferring to firewire from a DV Quicktime Movie or AVI, I never have any problems with dropped frames, bad colors, etc. (Make sure your camcorder has analog/AV out for dumping to VHS). Video comes out production quality every time. Importing is also near loss less. Highly recommended. I also use Premiere 6 for importing and exporting DV.

Added Notes from a visitor:

Most of the larger animation studios (Pixar, PDI, ILM, Sony for example) are switching over to Linux operating systems because of the speed/price issue. Linux does not support Quicktime, and because of it’s direct competition with Apple and Microsoft, I don’t think it ever will. I receive a lot of requests to look at people’s demo reels online. When I go to their web sites I see that it’s all quicktime I have to turn them down or request that they send me a video tape.

That said I still would use Quicktime to display samples of my demo reel. It’s a good format. But I would also recommend posting more then one format for people to chose from. MPEG is a good secondary format that is supported by linux systems. If you would like studios like PDI to look at a demo reel I would recommend offering more then one format.

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