High Quality Movie Encoding

Once you have rendered frames, there are two steps to encoding a high quality movie. First, the frames may need some last minute adjustments (anti-aliasing, adjusting frame size, applying logos, etc.). Second, one should use the right encoder with the right parameters.

Preparing Frames

Often it is desirable to have anti-aliased images. Jaggies can be distracting, and the distraction can be aggravated during animation. The simple approach is to render frames that are between 2x and 3x larger in each direction than the desired final frame, and then average these down to the correct size.

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to build all frames in parallel.

Encoding

The best (in terms of image quality, small file sizes, and portability of the final movie across differing platforms) movies come from H.264 encoding (which is another name for MPEG-4 Part 10. Although the actual encoding is standardized, the result is "packaged" in ways that are often not standardized. For example, there is an x.264 implementation of the standard that makes great preview movies under Linux, but is not honored by Microsoft's player or Apple's player. By staying with the Apple Quicktime Wrapper around Apple's H.264 implementation, we get portability to any place able to play quicktime movies (and that includes Microsoft and Linux platforms).

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