I am working on a interactive storybook type app and was wondering what are best ways to incorporate full motion video sequences in such apps.
The problems I can imagine are of a high storage requirements and playback. For example the new Ipad's resolution is pretty high and I wouldn't think it would be wise to make the sequences at the native resolution, the files would be huge!
What do you people think would be the best resolution to make the full motion video sequences at?
Also what is the recommended size of a interactive storybook style app? I know that filesize limit for app store 3g downloads is 20mb or similar. I think I cant fit the content to that, but what would be the next step up?
I don't know if there's a cap on app size, I assume there is, but some games are hundreds of megabytes. Of course, they have to be downloaded via wifi or synched to a device. That's your next class of apps, there's the "under 20 MB crowd" and the "over 20 MB crowd"
Honestly, if you run video at the resolution of the iPad1/2 it's going to look no worse on an iPad3. However, you're going to be hard pressed to fit anything more than a minute or two in even with good compression. If you dropped the resolution some, say half that of an iPad, you'll squeeze out a little more room but not a whole lot.
My solution to these sort of things is to either use a series of stills, and/or setup sequences of tweened animations using the existing game assets. Personally I think it ends up looking way better than trying to run a bunch of low res, heavily compressed video, and I do not know of any technical solution that would allow for a hefty amount of high quality video under.
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