Earth Moon Sun Animation Test

Testing an animation of Earth, Moon, and Sun. MPEG4, 320x240, 30 fps I did this just for fun to see how it would turn out, and to test the limits of YouTube. I created the animation with Blender 2.43 (blender.org) Lessons learned: Movie compression prior to upload: * H264 gives much smaller files than MPEG4, so uploads are faster, but YouTube processing is often longer than the upload anyway. * Compressing movies can produce small color shifts due to color quantization. For this movie, H264 compression produces a faint purple cast on the oceans (prior to upload to YouTube). MPEG4 compression just makes the oceans a slightly darker blue, so it was used here. YouTube: * YouTube compression is pretty severe. It handles vlogging (talking head, little motion) but doesn't handle full frame motion very well. * Don't spend a lot of time working on fine detail--it probably won't show up on YouTube. What you see here pales in comparison to the original. :-( * Uploading movies smaller than 320x240 produces noticeable image degradation. Movies larger than 320x240 don't look any better. (YouTube recommends 320x240.) * Uploading movies at 30 frames per second will result in smoother motion than 15 frames per second. But the Flash player can still randomly hiccup on playback. Sometimes playback will be smooth (thus the file has all the frames), other times it will stutter. (On a Mac. On a PC, the player seems to tear frames instead of stutter.)