problem with final render for animations
by orchids of wrath
on
Sep 19, 2007 at 2:48:54 pm
hi all,
I'm having a really obnoxious problem with final renders for my animations. Still pics are fine, but when i try to render a normal quicktime/AVI animation the colors look all crazily shaded and messed up. When i see each frame individually in the picture viewer they look perfect, but the second i play the entire animation on any media player (like quicktime or windows media player) they are clearly not right.
I'm rendering with best AA and 800x600 in the format "AVI Movie large" , with all the other settings default. (AVI movie large is the only one that doesn't give me errors when i try to render)
its so frustrating, could somebody please help? thanks guys.
Re: problem with final render for animations by Jack Cook on Sep 21, 2007 at 11:02:30 am
You would probably have better luck rendering the animation as an image sequence, such as JPEG, and then importing the image sequence into a movie editor and exporting the movie from there. I do it this way using Quicktime Pro to import the image sequence (I'm using a Mac; I don't know what other program you could use with Windows - will Media Player do this?) and save the result as a movie. I've always found rendering a movie from Cinema as a movie format to be problematic, and now I only do that for short test renders. Another advantage of rendering an image sequence is that if, for some reason, your computer, or Cinema, crashes you won't lose all your rendering; you can just start where the rendering left off according to the frame number last rendered before the crash. If you are rendering as a movie format and there's a crash, you lose the entire render.
Re: problem with final render for animations by Brian Jones on Sep 21, 2007 at 1:21:26 pm
excepting that if you render to a sequence don't do it to jpegs. Jpegs are compressed which degrades the quality, and when you then compress to a movie format the quality degrades again. The resulting file is usually bigger than if you made a movie from uncompressed images as well (that's a long explanation but it's true).
A good thing to remember is to compress as few times as possible.
Re: problem with final render for animations by orchids of wrath on Sep 23, 2007 at 3:54:08 am
thanks guys. So what image type is best for a sequence if not jpeg? And do you guys know of a good movie editing program for windows that I can use to sequence pictures as well as finalize my animations?
Re: problem with final render for animations by Brian Jones on Sep 23, 2007 at 5:06:44 am
Anything uncompressed that your assembly/editing program will accept. Targa, Tiff, Pict, BMP have been the usual choices over the years. TIFF is likely most popular. Photoshop PSD would be good too if your program understands it (Adobe Premiere and/or After Effects would if those are your choice for editor - as will a number of others...). Others will have to chime in on the PC editing software, I've used Premiere, only dabbled in AE and the rest is Mac only (FCP etc.) so not much knowledge of good choices outside of Premiere from me.
Re: problem with final render for animations by Jack Cook on Sep 24, 2007 at 12:10:04 pm
QuickTime Pro is also available for Windows. It's $29.99. It will import an image sequence, and also export a movie with a number of compression options.
