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[Bobert]

I'm having trouble trying to figure out which are the best compression settings for rendering avi's out of anim8or. Can you guys tell me what settings have worked for you and any tips that make rendering avi's faster while preserving quality?

[dwsel]

After rendering for "Red and moving" challenge I can suggest rendering to single bmp for each frame. I had once a crash during rendering and if didn't render this way I would have to start rendering from beginning. Then I assembled frames with VirtualDub http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/ and compressed with DivX codec. To set bitare with good quality to compression ratio I usually use formula:
( (x_resolution * y_resolution * frames_per_second) / 6400 ) * M
And the multiplier of 1.5 is usually fine for me. For audio I use mp3 compression.
If you want to host your video on Youtube or Vimeo you might consider different settings (higher quality) or different codecs.

Good habit is to keep your animation in uncompressed form too (bmp and uncompressed wav for audio) of course if your hard drive has enough free space. After work you may put materials into archive (zip/rar/7z etc.) or drop them to cd/dvd to release space for new projects

[Bobert]

Interesting. Can virtualdub also combine multiple audio tracks with a movie?

[ENSONIQ5]

Unless I am rendering something where each frame takes over 30 minutes I continue to render direct to AVI's, with no compression, in lots of 50 or 100 frames at a time.  For a 600 frame animation this creates between 6 and 12 AVI's that need only be placed in sequence in any video editor (even MovieMaker) and rendered down.  At this stage you should choose your compression standard, and the best advice I can give there is experiment with what you have available and see what works best.

[dwsel]

No. You'll need editor for audio as well (for example Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ). Basically when you put your frames together into avi you need to create audio track as long as the assembled movie. Precisely mark your movie's timings (when each thing happen, when scene changes). Using audio editor you add audio effects in these points synchronizing them with video. After it's done you're saving project, downsampling your audio and saving to both - uncompressed wav and compressed mp3. Then going back to Virtualdub you put audio track chose video compression settings and render whole. to compressed avi.

[floyd86]

What ensoniq says i right, depending on your computer.... if you don't have a pretty stable computer it's better to render frame by frame.
If you indeed have a stable computer and maybe even a multi core processor, this is a very good way. Have multiple cores will also allow your to render multiple parts at the same time.
Open the files you want to render twice (two opened anim8or windows) and let one render the frames 0-50 ie and the second render the frames 51-100. This way you render twice as fast!
I managed to run 5 renders at the same times on my quadcore (5 times faster render ), but it can't use your computer anymore untill it done rendering.

[Bobert]

Wow this is very insightful information. Thanks guys!