3dmax rendering question

When i render almost anything in 3dmax4 it comes out in the end playing at warp speed when viewed in windows media player as a avi file. What can i do to slow the playback down make the animation longer or what, sometimes i animate something all the way to the end of the time line... and it comes out sometimes to 3 or 4 seconds of video..

What framerate did you set?

For PAL you should use 25, for NTSC not sure, but i think 29.997.
(I take PAL now for my exampled because I am used to that)
This means that you need to have 25 frames of 3D animation for one second of movie.
For a minute, you´ll need 1500 frames in your timeline then.

You can go down to about 12 fps to make the animation still smooth and not wasting that much space, but i recommend against it. You eg. can´t use a video cutting tool to mix it with "Real Life" scenes then anymore.

M.

i think i had it at like 5 or 10 frames per second in that other thing not pal but if i render it in pal it will be almost viewable by anyone with some type of media player right?

thanks for the info i'm sort of a newbie

If you keep it on PCs/Macs, you don´t need to care about PAL or NTSC or framerates. The VGA screen / monitor is usually not compatible to either of them . And media players that can´t deal with arbitrary (reasonable) framerates are broken. It´s only if you leave the PC terrain, eg. you want to put your stuff on a DVD or VCD to show it to people with a DVD player / CDI / ??? or if you put it on VHS (flickering). But VHS also needs other rendering settings not compatible to PC media players (field rendering - and PAL is not compatible to NTSC. But don´t use that on the PC or you will have horizontal lines all over your movie). From my experience, you have to re-render everything once you switch to another medium...