Topic awaiting preservation: Post Render/Animate Processing (Page 1 of 1)

I've been working on an animtaion for some art/graphics coursework, i've been using 3d Studio 3.1 for a while now but i've never really done animations before.
Eventually i figured out that you're meant to render the whole thing as pictures FIRST and then compile these into a movie. I've been using DivX 4.0 to compress the avi file down a bit. Anyone here got any hints on how to get the best out of this, its all kind of confusing and all the tutorials i can find on it are how to rip dvd's and encode them as avi files, interesting but not relavant.
ALso are programs which i can do all this in, like not in Max. I'd quite like to insert scenes and stuff around my sequence. Should i be using videopost? Bascically are there any free ways to edit my video

: : Relain : :

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

IMHO saving each picture of a sequence to a seperate file is only useful for network rendering. Because Max is unable to put the diffrent rendering jobs directly into a .avi file. Therefor each Computer on the network renders its frame and puts it into a directory. Then you collect them and put them together.

Anyway, I guess that didn't answer you question what you need is some sort of postproduction prog. I guess one of the leading products on the market is this one here.

cheers, Tw!ddleFinger


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Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?

Professionals do render to individual frames.

The thing to remember here is that making a video file from frames takes a scant fraction of the time it takes to render a complex animation. If you directly render to AVI, and decide the AVI codec wasn't quite right, you have to re-render the whole thing. If you rendered to frames, you can tweak the settings for the video and remake the AVI. You can also make a high quality video and a small web version from the same rendered frames.

Another benefit is when you need to re-render some aspect of the animation. For example, a client might want a certain scene element to be changed ("I wanted that pen to be blue, not red"). If that object is only in frames 10223-10312 of a 30000 frame animation, you would not want to re-render the whole animation. Re-rendering those few frames and making a new video file would take a fraction of the time.


As far as apps, I use Adobe After Effects for compositing, and Adobe Premiere for video editing. They are expensive, though. I've seen many cheap video packages in Best Buy and CompUSA; perhaps they can do what you're looking for.

cheers guys, rendering individual frames is quite good if you haven't got a clue what to do with the avi codecs, i mean you can just load the sequence up in the RAM player and watch it there hehe.
I kind of thought it was gonna mean some adobe product [they're always the best]. Or the poor man's solution would be just to open each frame i wanted to change and play with it in photoshop. mmm thousands of jpgs.

No, not jpegs. JPEGs, since they employ compression, are gonna do funny things to your image. As someone once told me, they like to forget certain colours to save space. I suggest a non compressed one if you want ultra quality, like (and I shudder to think of the HDD space this is gonna take up) a BITMAP image.

Use TIFFs or TGAs. They both use lossless compression. Bit bigger than a JPG, but far smaller than a BMP.

Which one you use is mostly a matter of preference. TIFFs came from the publishing world, while TGAs came from video editing technology. Both can store 24 bit color images with no loss.

PNG is decent, too.

I don't think a lot of video editing software will accept PNGs yet. I haven't checked in the latest versions, but when I first started using them, you had to use numbered sequences of TGAs or TIFFs. Since Max can output an animation as a numbered sequence, it makes things very easy

Das: Where do you select to output to a numbered sequence? I haven't seen that as of yet.

I'll have to look it up when I get home. I don't have Max on my work PC.

I seem to remember it being a checkbox in the render dialog, somewhere near where you specify the output file.