help - how do i improve animation(video) quality?

[tanuj]

Hi, im an undergraduate engineering student working on a research project to simulate the A380s landing and taxing tasks at the Singapore intl airport to evaluavate the adequacy of aerodrome displays.
Im primarily using 3DS max to create the simulation, although im getting good rendered images of my simulation, the animation created has a very poor video quality.
I have tried to create the simulation at diffrent frames per second, but again that doest improve the simulation much.
Could someone suggest some way with which the video quality of the animation can be improved?Do I need to switch over to some other software?If getting a better graphics card could improve the situation?
In short how do I generate an animation with good picture quality?

[SplineGod]

What resolution is your video and in what format is the movie?

[tanuj]

What resolution is your video and in what format is the movie?

Well.....ive been trying diffrent settings(Codecs/compressers), but with not much improvement in the video quality....
ive tried using Cinepak, Divx 6.6.1, Quicktime(.mov).....with the best possible settings.....but again not much luck....
how do u create high end animation?

[SplineGod]

Ive had good result with quicktime using sorensen 3 codec. Are you rendering directly to quicktime in Max or using something external to convert frames to quicktimes?

[richdj]

Have a look through this forum, Kevman posted recently about setting up QT, sorensen 3.. I assume your rendering out the still images first, try re-rendering to a few different qualities..

Rich

[Jweimer]

Have you tried rendering it without compression first? That would be the best place to start. If the animation still looks like crap at high resolution, then I'd burn the AVI file to a disc and play it on the highest end computer I could find (like one in your engineering dept). If it looks great on the other machine then it's probably your video card or monitor. If it looks like crap on the other machine, it might still be your video card, but at least you know the monitor works. Oh . . . what version of Max are you using? Version 8 went with a different shader set and you almost always HAD to upgrade your video card.

Best of luck.