Sequence vs Movie clip

I just watched your tutorial (at the Pret-A-3D site) on placing an image sequence as a background image. This will help greatly down the road for matching motions when animating characters, but I was curious whether you were recommending an image sequence instead of a movie clip, seeing as there seems to be an option for one.

Is the sequence inherently better in this use? I understand the reasons behind exporting the Blender animations as a sequence, but it seems like it might be an extra step just to get a small reference clip in the window. High resolution wouldn't be an issue here. It would just need to be clear enough to see the pose in each frame while matching the model's pose to it. If a sequence is better, I can certainly do that, but I would typically need to bring the clip into another app, then export the image sequence before bringing it in to Blender.

Either way, I'm glad to see there's a way to do this. I'm not quite at the stage where I'll be using it right away, but when I am, it should really help me time out the movements. I have yet to look into whatever lip sync methods are in Blender, but even if there were none, I could even use this method to do that.

I sure wish I had about 20 extra hours a day, though. There's so much to do I hate having to waste most of my time at the day job getting tired (I'm sure there's many, many more with this same problem, too).

Good to hear. It's more or less what I thought and probably more useful that you demonstrated it with the sequence. I imagine I'll have the need to use both at different times. For the times when I just want to act out a reference motion using my Flip camera, it'll be easier to use the clip. If I sketched a few drawings I'll use the sequence option. More versatility from Blender. :)

Paolo,

I recall in one of your outstanding BSG tutorials you mentioned that Blender 'likes' .png image sequences for rendering. I'm looking for the best file type (and/or codec) output from Blender to play back animations using quicktime. (QT does playback .png image sequences of course) I'm looking for the output combination that will provide the smoothest playback of quicktime animation videos with lot's of fast motion. I realize data rates and CPU power also figure into this equation....but can you make any suggestions regarding movie animation output from Blender? I have experimented with quite a few and have yet to find that sweet spot....

Thanks,
Mike

OUTSTANDING Paolo. THANK YOU!

The Very Best,
Mike

Very sensible. I'm aware of a number of situations where image sequences are the better option, such as a long AE render, where a crash means starting over and the sequence lets you pick up with all progress up to that point.

In this instance I wanted to make sure it wasn't significantly better using a clip as a reference as a background clip. For instance if Blender handled it better with a png for each frame and a clip taxed its' resources having to sample it from a quicktime. I wonder about a long image sequence's effect on processing as well, though. Having to flip through 200-300 stills seems as if it would be the slower method, Photoshop cries if I try to open more than 16 images at a time, so it seems a bit like heavy lifting.

My goal here was just to have a frame-by-frame pose reference to animate with, then delete. In this case, simple lo-res Flip-cam clips would be used, and it just represents a whole process pass to create the sequence when the clip is plug and play ready. Of course the resulting animation would then be exported as an image sequence for Ae.