Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/08/29/lower-bitrate-on-3d-animation-equals-smaller-file-equals-faster-page-load-time-on-site/

This is what I set out to test.

With the default Blender audio and video bitrate settings, my animation was rendering as a very beautiful 3D film with CD quality sound, but it was well over a megabyte in size. While waiting for this huge file to download and be displayed people have two choices; a) go and make a nice cup of tea, or b) click away to some other faster loading site. Guess which is more likely. So because I want my pages to load as quickly as possible, no matter how many animations each contains, I dialed the bitrates on my .mov files down considerably, and this has produced smaller file sizes.

From an animation in a 1.5 MB .mov file I have come down to a 300 KB .mov file – but there have been trade offs. The sound now sounds a little like it was recorded underwater and there is a little bit of blocking in the video, but all in all I’m very happy with how much animation I can pack into such a small file size.

Now instead of fiddling about with settings I can concentrate on making the animation better and funnier. The basic idea of the animation is already there but it isn’t yet obvious that the thing the cat is spitting out is a hairball. I’m going to have to get to grips with producing hair in my 3D animation. It seems daunting to me right now, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it, and a hairball is probably an easier place to start than a full head of glossy Charlie’s Angles big hair.