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Moviemaking tips please
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Moviemaking tips please // New Users
Post by weaveribm // Sep 11, 2007, 5:12am
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weaveribm
Total Posts: 592
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We want to create 24fps Vray/GI animations (flythrough) and I see that there's many many types of movie specification in the Render To File function
Also there's a 24fps parameter in the camera object's properties
Is the Render To File function only for Workspace animations and not Vray/GI animations?
How to render the Vray animation (rendering to dot png auto-incrementing frames) at 24fps please?
I've tried setting the camera to 24fps but VirtualDub insists that the clips produced are 30fps (actually 29.94 or similar) - and asking VirtualDub to change the framerate to 24fps means lots of doubled frames in the final clip
Thanks in advance for help offered!
Peter |
Post by Jack Edwards // Sep 11, 2007, 5:32am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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First thing is to ALWAYS render out to png or tga. Don't render out to AVI unless you're using a lossless compression codec like Techsmith or Lagarith.
The virtualdub settings are a bit unintuitive in their discription.
The top part of the box is what you want Virtualdub to "pretend" the frame rate is. So think of this as current frame rate.
The middle part of it is the speed to render out as -- target frame rate.
Virtualdub actually does a really good job of interpolating frames when you convert from a higher frame rate to a lower one. So I recommend rendering out your image at double the frame rate you need, then resample it down to your target frame rate.
This will also give you a smoother video. |
Post by weaveribm // Sep 11, 2007, 7:59am
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weaveribm
Total Posts: 592
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Thanks very much Jack. Before I get to post-processing though I'd like to have TS render at 24fps to reduce the number of conversions needed. Any idea how to use the camera to render at 24fps please? I can see the 24fps parameter in the camera properties
Ah wait- I see what you mean. There is no framerate associated with sequential renders they have no existence in the time domain doh! :)
That must be for creating avis which yes you're right are prone to crash during the night and nothing to show for it just a broken file. And the screaming :)
That happened just the once to me and once was quite enough yes, rendering frames allows picking up the timeline when things go wrong
Peter |
Post by Jack Edwards // Sep 11, 2007, 8:32am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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The other reason is that you don't want to use a lossy compression method on the image twice -- which is why I mentioned Lagarith and Techsmith. ;)
I believe you'll find what you looking for by clicking the settings tab, then clicking on the animation view (4D) window. :)
-Jack. |
Post by Dragneye // Sep 11, 2007, 6:26pm
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Dragneye
Total Posts: 602
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Alrighty then... newbie raises hand. "Umm..."
1. Render first to .png, .tga, for the sole reason of avoiding losing your work in a crash?
2. I've read before that a technique is to render each frame seperately (did I get that right?) and then to combine elsewhere. A. Why? B. having a few hundred frames per small animation makes that a problem... no? |
Post by Nez // Sep 11, 2007, 10:51pm
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Nez
Total Posts: 1102
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I believe the point (I'm no expert) is that it's better to avoid rendering animations directly to a 'movie' format, eg avi file as you have a moderately high risk of being left with a useless file after hours and hours of rendering, should sometjhing go wrong (eg the computer crashes, your cat jumps on the keyboard, etc).
If you render the whole thing out as a sequence of still frames, these can then be combined in any number of video editing packages to make a movie file with compression of your choice. I use Adobe Premiere for editing, but Virtualdub etc are also available (I think that's free?). And no, this isn't difficult - they usually have an option that allows you to import a sequence of numbered frames and combine into a single animation.
The big advantage is that should something go wrong partway through, you are at least left with some of the frames in usable form, so you don't have to re-run the whole render. The first way you're usually left with a big avi file that may be incomplete or even won't open properly.... |
Post by Dragneye // Oct 16, 2007, 5:45pm
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Dragneye
Total Posts: 602
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Ahh. Thanx Nez. Animation is my ultimate goal, so anymore/many more comments/explanations/tricks will be GREATLY appreciated :) |
Post by TomG // Oct 17, 2007, 5:04am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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It has other benefits as well as avoiding losing hours of work in a crash too. For instance, you render, and all is great except for one point in the movie when an object moves a little inside another, that you hadn't noticed until you rendered. Disaster!
With the separate frames, it is easy to just re-render the affected frames into the sequence, and you're done (without having to splice and cut whole video segments).
It can be nice and easy to make video cuts and edits too, since you can insert sections easily, load up frames 0 to 427 from one render sessions, then frames 0 to 100 from another render done from a different camera, then 428 to 600 from the first again, and so on. Again it can avoid cutting and splicing and moving things around, making it a little easier to assemble these cuts from different cameras.
Another benefit is that you can use Photoshop and a macro to apply an effect to your video. Sure you can do that with video editing software but you might not be able to afford video software that has nice filters and effects, and if you already have Photoshop (or GIMP or other 2D software laying around) with a batch process ability you can actually use your 2D filters on your videos.
So, it's actually broadly useful for many reasons :) And yes, you will end up with thousands or tens of thousands of files for an animation of any significant length (and much more for animations of even more length!). Note of course that an uncompressed video format (AVI with no compression) is really only storing all those separate frames anyway, just clumped into one file, so no extra storage required by separate frames in image file format. Lossless compression like Lagarith / Techsmith may save you some space, but then using PNG (a lossless image compression) should be pretty reasonable too.
HTH!
Tom |
Post by Dragneye // Oct 29, 2007, 6:32am
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Dragneye
Total Posts: 602
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Thank you Tom. I'll be starting an animation in WIP so all this stuff will become helpful when I get to the animatin' part. :) |
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