Digital Art Zone

Hello
I’m about to upgrade to Carrara pro 8 64 bit. I see a note about Quicktime 64 bit having issues.
Is this on a PC or Mac. I’m on a PC and render using Quicktime Animation Codec ( Which Works Great!)
Will this be a problem in 64 bit version? Should I bother to install or just use 32 bit?
Thanks
8068

Apple is the problem .

There is NO version of Quicktime, built for 64 bit systems.
and Apple, seem to be dragging their heels on any development,. while apparently focusing on the latest mini teeny weeny “I bollox” which nobody needed in the first place.

The 32bit version is all there is.

As far as Carrara is concerned,. it’s a PITA if you’re regularly exporting draft stuff as Quicktime,. but,.. as they say,.. Other products are also available.

One good thing is that you get BOTH the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Carrara 8 pro. So,. you can create a scene in the 64bit version, then save it,. load it into the 32 bit version and render as quicktime.

It’s better, and safer, to export your animations as “Sequenced image files” like individual (frames of film).
Any good Video editor, can load a numbered sequence of images, as a “clip” and export that in whatever final format you need.

I’m not sure this is true any longer. “QuickTime X was completely rewritten to implement modern audio video codecs in 64-bit.” Lion and Mountain Lion are 64-bit OS, and include QT X. I say I’m not sure, because while wikipedia says QT X is 64-bit, and the new OS are supposed to be 64-bit only, I can’t find anything on the Apple site saying clearly that QT X is 64-bit. So…

3Dage
First I bought the normal Pro 8 Today ( $171) on the black Friday sale.
That feels good.
That did fix the Issues with loading the .cbr files, thank you.
I did try your method of using a polyline to create a single Poly to extrude.
That worked well ( but I may have to redo 5 hours of work from this weekend )
Thank You!

I’m a bit disappointed with quicktime. I am doing a hour video which much of is animation.
I edit in Sony Vegas. So I was generating HUGE Files. When compressed in the video edit they really lost something.
I posted this on the Sony Vegas fourm. A guy there that is heavy into Vegas ( like you are with Carrara ) and uses Carrara
suggested the quicktime Animation codec. I love it.  It looks just fantastic, file size large but not ridiculous, and Vegas handles it like
a champ. When I export these out of Vegas they still look great. So I guess I’ll just use the 32 bit for now, but was looking forward to those screaming renders I had hoped I would get from the 64 bit version.
Thanks again
8068

Another option, is to get Quicktime pro player,..

It can load up a sequence of images,. and export out as quicktime .mov,. but,.. realistically,. if you compress the render to video, then compress it again in your editor,.., you’re losing quality at each step.

Render sequenced frames, because… (depending on the image format) there’s no compression.
you retain the ability to edit any single image,.. for things like poke-through.
If your system crashes,. you can pick up from the frame it stopped on.  instead of starting again, and possible crashing again.

HI Carlton

I hear you,
several months ago I got a mailshot from them about the new version, because I bought Quicktime,
but so far, I’ve not seen or heard of any implementation of it on PC,. and I know it’s something that the Carrara developers want to slot in, and get moving with,.. so you would imagine that if it was available,. we wouldn’t still have the issue of no quicktime on 64bit

I hope you’re right and they’ve finally done it,..

As Andy mentioned, you can open sequenced images in Quicktime and expoprt them using whatever compression method you wish. I might disagree with Andy on this a bit, but each compression method is different, with some being lossier than others, so there is the possibility of no visible trans-encoding artifacts, especially if you save to a loss-less format. If you wish to render to a movie file instead of an image sequence, then the Animation Codec is great because it can also handle alphas. Under options where you set color depth, set it to Millions+. You could also just save an uncompressed file as well.

I use 64bit Carrara and render to QT Animation. The QT32 thing opens and runs in the background….

Has anyone tried a speed test on all the formats? Is there any reason to believe QT32 is significantly slower than any of the other render formats? PNG Sequence for example?

In the past my complaint was that the hdd spins and the QT re-writes itself with each frame, accumulating longer and longer pauses between frames…., but for short animations only a few seconds long, this additional time is less headache than converting image sequences…. It’s a trade off, and YMMV.

Unless I’m having a problem, I generally just render to the Animation Codec. I can’t run 64 bit Carrara or anything else unless it was coded to utilize PPC 64 bit (which I’ve had since ‘03/‘04 and which Intel and Microsoft took their sweet time to get to.)

Holly
Are you on a Mac? I don’t even see Quicktime as a render option in 64bit Carrara on my Windows machine, though I do see it the 32 bit version on the same machine.
Thanks
8068

Without trying to speak for Holly, I’m pretty sure Holly’s primarily a Mac user, though I’ve read some posts where she mentions using PCs as well.

I recall the Windows version of Carrara renders to AVIs, but I don’t know which codecs are comparable. If you have the Windows version of Quicktime Pro, you can render to sequenced images such as pngs, tif, etc. and open in Quicktime. QT will even preserve the alpha channels (if any) as long as you export the movie to a format that can handle it, such as the Animation codec. I’m on a Mac as well, so I can’t say for sure what codecs are supported across both platforms.