AVI Files

The AVI (Audio-Video Interleaved) format is the Windows standard for movie files. The .avi file name extension indicates a Windows AVI movie file.

An AVI file is created when you make a preview animation. You can also render your final output to an AVI file. Although 3ds max produces its highest-quality output by rendering single-frame TGA files or rendering directly to a digital disk recorder, you can still get good results rendering AVI files.

AVI files are used as input to 3ds max in several ways, for example:

As animated materials in the Material Editor
As viewport backgrounds for rotoscoping
As input images for compositing in Video Post

Interface

Clicking Render or Setup in the Render Output File dialog displays the Video Compression dialog.

Compressor—Select the codec (compressor/decompressor) you want to use to compress the file. The software supports Cinepak, Intel Indeo Video R3.2, 4.5 and 5.10, Microsoft Video 1, and Autodesk RLE DrivX MPEG 4 Low-Motion and Fast-Motion, and Full Frames (uncompressed) codecs. You can also render uncompressed frames (and then use an external application to compress the file). Video-file compression is an art in itself, with many aspects to consider.

Compression Quality—Use the slider to select the quality you want. The higher you set the quality, the larger the file size will be.

Keyframe Every n Frames—Select the interval between the Delta keyframes used to compare one frame with another and generate in-between frames. Too large an interval will create loss of quality in the AVI file as a whole.

Configure—Click this button to see any additional options specific to the codec.

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