Animation Output

sjefen · February 09, 2008, 04:43:52 PM

I have 2 questions.

1) When I render out an animation all I get is a lot of images. I assume I have to stitch these together. But how?

2) I'm also wondering if it is possible, or will be possible to just save as avi. and chose divx or xvid for example?

Hannes · February 09, 2008, 05:38:24 PM

NEVER NEVER NEVER choose AVI or another movie file as output even if it's possible!!!!
Always use an image sequence.
Imagine you are rendering a 200 frame animation as AVI and after your 198th frame your computer crashes. Everything will be lost.
When you are rendering a sequence you still will have the images that you rendered before it crashed.
It's possible to make a movie file out of your images with a lot of programs. Here's one of them:
http://www.terradreams.de/All/Tutorials/Movietut/Movietutorial.php
It's called Fast Movie Processor and it's free and easy to use. (The link is the german Terragen community. You'll find the program under: 2) Fast Movie Processor, "Direktdownload")
Hope this helps!

JohnnyBoy · February 09, 2008, 06:52:26 PM

Virtualdub is another free choice:
http://www.virtualdub.org/

It can write out to .avi using divx and other codecs.

bigben · February 09, 2008, 07:07:44 PM

... 200 frames isn't scary enough... that's only 4 seconds

It's also easier to batch process single images to adjust contrast/sharpness or other tweaks on single images. VirtualDub also has some useful preprocessing as well.

sjefen · February 11, 2008, 08:37:09 PM

Thanks guys. I'll have a look at this.

mr-miley · February 12, 2008, 04:40:22 AM

I tend to use RAD video tools. Bink to be precise You can get it from here http://www.radgametools.com

Ta

Miles

Piimon · February 12, 2008, 06:01:30 AM

Adobe After Effects is great for compositing your animations.

Free trial from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/?ogn=EN_US-gntray_dl_trialdownloads

EBAndrew · February 15, 2008, 01:10:27 PM

So far of all the ones I've used After Effects is (believe it or not) the easiest to pick up and use. If you can stomach the 800MB download I'd give that one a try. It allows for multi-layered rendering too if that's a selling point for ya.

neon22 · February 17, 2008, 05:33:15 AM

And if you buy the pro version of Quicktime it will turn image sequences into movies. (about 30USD I think)
Super Transcoder will let you transcode those sequences into all sorts of useful movie formats including mobile phones, MP4, DIVX, etc

As for compositing. well :-( The cheapest most Powerful is ImageMagick - if your scripting skills are up to it. Its very simple to use but no big glossy UI.