Exporting Animation Files for a DVD
If you’re planning on exporting your animation so that it can be played on a DVD player, there are some tips that can make the process run a little more smoothly. Set your animation to use a frame rate of 30 fps for NTSC or to 25 fps for PAL. NTSC is common in the U.S. and Canada, and the PAL format is common in Europe.
For the resolution, you can choose the one of the 1080p presets in the Project Settings dialog box to use a resolution of 1440 pixels by 1080 pixels for HDV or the HDTV preset with a resolution of 1920 by 1080.
Although these presets will work fine, you can actually improve the visual quality of the animation if you double the resolution and then resize it later in your video editing software. The key to doubling the resolution is to keep the ratios between the width and height consistent. For full-screen animations, the ratio is 4:3 and for widescreen it is 16:9. To double the resolution for your animation for television formats, use the following resolutions:
NTSC-full screen: 1280 by 960
NTSC-widescreen: 1280 by 720
PAL-full screen: 1536 by 1152
PAL-widescreen: 2048 by 1152
Within the Export Animation dialog box, make sure you have the Antialiased Edges and the Use NTSC-Safe Colors options enabled. If you have the disk space, try to export the animation uncompressed.
Caution
The tricky part about exporting an Anime Studio animation to DVD is that the computer uses square pixels, but the pixels on a television are rectangular.
Within the video editing software that you are using, apply a blur filter followed by a resize filter if you’ve rendered the animation at double the resolution, and finally add a gamma correction filter. Then select the DVD output setting and make sure the Interlace option is disabled and render the final output. This will encode the animation file so that it can be played on a DVD. This output file can now be loaded into a DVD authoring package where you can add menus.