animation question

[rendimage]

I'm going to be creating a 3-4 minute animation for a client. I've done small 20-30 second animations in the past. but I'm nevous to work on soming so long in such a short time frame. What is the best way to work....structure my time?

I was planing on saving the individual frames as targa and then compiling in premiere. Should I invest in a pinnacle card? The animation will be played in a powerpoint presentation.

any advise.....compression techniques image resolution that kind of thing.

thanks

r :P

[Da_elf]

well. my advice isnt much....comming from a senior editor hehehe.
1: YES!!! render to an image sequence. If for any possible reasons you need to stop the render and need to restart it there is no problem when using an image sequence.
2: you dont even need premiere to piece together an image sequence. Just open video post in max and dont bother adding a scene event, add an image input event....load your image sequence as a sequence *.ifl file....then add an image output event. Your choice of compression is usually limited to your capture card for video. For instance we use matrox digisuite LE at work and need to use matrox codecs.
3: you mention its a powerpoint file you need which means you dont need a video export card. ive found mpg files to play fairly nice in powerpoint. Some people prefer quicktime but im not a quicktime fan. www.tmpgenc.com is a good place to get a free mpg encoder. then again if you are compiling with premiere its got its own mpg encoder.
4: time structuring is all dependant on the project. sometimes some of the simplest scenes can take forever to render and some complex scenes can take small amounts of time. You need to structure your personal deadlines of modeling, texturing, animation and rendering around your assumed render time.
Well thats about as much help as i can give