I've seem to have found a nice combo of a free app and codec that does a nice job of stringing frames together into an actual video. Basically you save your image sequence to a folder (.jpg is fine, but you can try others), open up VirtualDub, then open the first frame of the sequence in it (it automatically gets the rest), then you set the frame rate (but when there, set the second part where it says "convert frames to" to 24 or 30), then set video to full processing, then set the compression to Xvid (default settings seem to be just fine, but you can force keyframes if you want - it helps for making the video "pause-able"), then save the video to .avi. And you can also add audio while you're at it. (But Vdub doesn't currently sequence audio afaik, it just grabs the track, so you may have to figure out something with audacity or another program.)

And to get the "widescreen" on YouTube, use 640 for width and 360 for height. (Or some variation with that aspect ratio.) I still have problems with them adding too much extra compression and fuzzing up my videos though. :glare: I'm guessing if you double the values, it may do a high quality version, but I haven't tried because I don't have a render farm or enough patience.

Oh yeah, some linkys...
www.virtualdub.org
www.xvid.org
audacity.sourceforge.net

One of the result videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIrUydJ5bBc

And another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsKx85ohZjI

I did a second version of the asteroid run with altered settings (in video response) to see if I could get YouTube to switch to high-qual mode, but it seemed to cause YouTube to dump even more of their fuzzing compression on it. (But it does go away a bit if using the &fmt=18 on the address.) So far, it seems Xvid works better with defaults and makes a smaller and faster uploading file.

Anyone else try this yet? (Or am I the one late to the party when it comes to putting together Carrara animations?) I seem to like Xvid a lot better than the free version of the Divx encoder or the Intel one (Indeo or Radius or whatever its called). It seems a lot more flexible on screen sizing, frame rate, and compression levels.

Also I haven't seen much for time-synching Audacity tracks to video, so that was probably a false lead (for now). But it's still a useful application for editing sound in its own right.