A time efficient compression technique, incorporating attention stimulating factors, for motion capture data is proposed. Compression ratios of 25:1 to 30:1 can be achieved with very little noticeable degradation in perceptual quality of animation. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed algorithm is much faster than comparable approaches using wavelets, thereby making our approach feasible for motion capture, transmission, and real-time synthesis on mobile devices, where processing power and memory capacity are limited.