United3dArtists Archive

hi together,

... for my next animated short i have to render multiple passes because there are to many to see in the scene - i can not render all objects together in one scene - impossible. So i render one pass and i would use this animation (video) as animated background for the next one and so on. Normaly this is not a problem i have done this before but now i got a problem.

Previously i used a uncompressed AVI to get the best quality for the background. But this time my animation is 1280 x 720 and 1980 Frames in length. This means the file is 5.3 GB !!!

As i rendered pass 2 the background was just visible until frame 1090. After that it was black. My tests shows that tS has a problem with avi files bigger than 4GB.

I could compress the video into DivX or XVID etc. BUT - and here comes the problem - the quality is to bad. That depends on what there is to see on the background. It is just a very dark blue gradient which smooths out into nearly black. But instead this smooth gradients i got color artefacts after compressing. (see attached image)

Has anybody a idea how i can convert this nearly lossless? I tried now 2 days to adjust the settings in x264, divx, xvid etc. but nothing works. I tried VirtualDub, AVS Video Converter, SUPER and a few more but the results are nearly the same and not acceptable.

I have the same problem. If I want a DVD quality, the files gets to large. What to do?

To compress with h264 from an uncompressed hd video don't use the original video bit rate. curiously it is not the best. Choose a custom setting. For example 30000 kbit/s or more (it depend of the limit of your soft). Ok it is not useful for a player but it is not the goal here. you can have a very big video but less than the limit for truespace. The quality is the same than an uncompressed video when the compressed size is about 10 time bigger than a normal and good movie. Ok, the interest is to do an uncompressed file when you do the render with truespace and the video background.

You could use an images sequence made with jpg stills rather than an avi file.

Or render your 2nd pass animation in TGA32 (transparency) format and mix the foreground/background in a video edition program.

Render all images with transparency could be the easiest way but with which video software could i overlay these images into a video file?

You dont show us the scene so i cant comment on how else it can be made but I do have ideas for these problems.
Apart from that I never had prolblems with the size of a clip and its filesize.Mainly because before I run into the to long take problem
i chop it into segments and render those segments and then put the whole thing together afterwards.
Wit objects with transparency i use Combustion but I dont expect you to have that so try to break the thing down as much as possible
and cut it together in a movie editor.
Apart from this my threads on workflow deal with exactly that problem ..... to big scenes which Ts doesnt like...
Peter

The big size comes from ClothMotion calculations for a lot of frames and a lot of vertices from the models. There should be more than one object in the scene and one alone creates a scene file with nearly 50MB. To handle this file is possible for tS but not for more than one of these objects - my tS6.6 will hang up.

Normaly i also split my scene's into more parts. The bad thing is. In this case the scene can not be splittet in many parts because there is no "cut" in the scene for 1:24min - it's a complete scene which needs one complete cloth calculation. All other methodes are to complicated to create ths scene with ClothMotion.

But now i found a solution. I found out that i can import transparent images into my video software (i use EditStudio). It's a bit more tricky but possible, so i use this method.

Thanks a lot for all your ideas.

Just a short qestion.

How do I do with JPG-stills and get it to a movie?

Design Devil is the right person to ask !
With his wonderfull BiVi application you can do that in seconds !
I love it !

Tommy wrote:Just a short qestion.

How do I do with JPG-stills and get it to a movie?

If you render to stills, the images will be sequentially numbered.

If you download a free program like VirtualDub, and in the file menu, load the first numbered frame, it will load all the rest of the frames automatically as a movie.

Then just save as avi, with your favorite compression.

It would still be better to render out to .bmps or .pngs then jpgs. No loss of quality there.

Kurt

Absolutly correct. VirtualDub does a great job here. Alternativ you can use my program BiVi (http://www.east-power-soft.de/index.php ... progs_bivi). It does the same. I wrote this before i know that VirtualDub can also do this .

Sometimes i think i should write a new BiVi version to create a avi file with more than one layer. I mean with transparent PNG or TGA files...could also be a useful tool. But this would be a bigger thing - nearly a simple video edit software - and in the moment i have no time to do this.

I have two programs for video edition. And the two let me blend animations via alpha channel and many other modes :
1. Aura (now called TVPAint Animation), but I almost don't use it anymore. It has a nice and soft interface though ; even better than tS -in its own range of features-. Higly recommended if you like to paint and create animation with a drawing tablet.
2. Vegas, which became my primary tool since I am now doing more video edition than pure 3D creation. It is fast and versatile (good for audio edition too).

This is an alternative, but also a question.

Can an avi be used as a background for rendering?

If it is posible the compositing will be done in the second render automaticly. Is it?

Hallo Emmanuel.

Which product of VEGA do you use and find best?

Rafa wrote:This is an alternative, but also a question.

Can an avi be used as a background for rendering?

If it is posible the compositing will be done in the second render automaticly. Is it?

depends on the program but in Truespace you can load an animation into the material editor.
You just place a box wioth the animated texture into the background of your animated frontobject.

Tommy wrote: Which product of VEGA do you use and find best?

Simply Vegas Pro (version 8). It offers everything I need