Digital Art Zone

Hey Tundra
Yeah, i’ve been rendering 20 frames to test the other codecs… none have worked (le cry)
I’m going to make another scene to try once the current image-sequence is completed… probably about 30 hours… fun… then try making it into a movie that way… the fun of trying to keep the quality the same too. urgh… not in the mood for this.

Look in the folder where you have sent the images, you will see them popping up and will be able to open and check on them, complete control Keep us posted, people learn a great deal from this stuff, good luck.

everyone keeps saying how much more control I apparently have… I guess i’m the only one here who prefers to re-render if something is wrong. if there’s an issue, i have to usually re-render the whole thing to keep the edit contiguous.
I can see what frame i’m on on DAZ too. calculating it frame by frame, it will take 31.33333333333333333 hours…

But do the images look ok. is it working?

zeddedd even when you “rendered” to uncompressed avi, Daz studio under application data daz studio roaming render somewhere was sticking 2000+  png imaves in a temp folder.
it then takes the extra step to compile an avi and scrubs out those temp files.
all programs render to image file
then compile an avi
it is an extra step that actually diminishes the quality of your finished render
and it is not very hard, takes up less room on your drive
to renderimage sequences to a temp folder
drag the first one into virtualdub (free easy opensource editor)
the rest follow, set framerate under video save as avi
just because you have always done something one way
does not make it better
learning better ways to do things
improves your skill
and makes you more proffesional
the pros use image sequences

well… now i have a heap of image-sequences and or some reason when I put them into sony, half go upside-down, some just go black and others change size…
A learning curve is one thing… but something with right-angles isn’t fair when it was working before.

Since i have the images, i’ll be trying out this ‘vurtualdub’ as an alternative…
but for something that is apparently meant to be easier and just as fast, this has taken nearly two weeks longer than the first time it rendered.

“just because you have always done something one way does not make it better”
I know, but i am doing it that way for a reason. because I know it and am not going to start experimenting on something untill i have more time. since now i’m so behind on this piece’s deadline, i’m not going to get paid for it, i don’t think being more professional is much of a consolation prize!

TapiocaTundra - 10 March 2013 06:18 PM

Look in the folder where you have sent the images, you will see them popping up and will be able to open and check on them, complete control Keep us posted, people learn a great deal from this stuff, good luck.

Yeah, cheers. the images look ok. But there’s something wrong with what i’m doing in sony because the movie-file has blanks, the image goes randomly upside-down and then looses quality…
so far, i’m rating this whole experience under “reasons to get a large hammer and reduce my computer to a fetching circuit-board rug!”

All I wanted was ‘oh, try refreshing this’ or a ‘did this change in your settings? there’s been complaints about that’
not ‘you’re doing it wrong, do this instead because you’re unprofessional using the built-in features’
all this has done is given me 3,303 image-files, a 4 gig useless video and the feeling that i’m being compared to slime.

So…, now you do the ‘frame’ method like everyone, hope you render in .png to save filesize and use Virtualdub (really great program) for the final movie? BTW, did you check your disk space lately? All the .avi files consume a large amount of disk space that could be an indicator for the problem you mentioned in your first post.
I have another thing for you to consider: a scene that takes almost two minutes? Why don’t you chop your movie into several scenes, every scene using a different cameraview, making it much more pleasant to watch, and also making your workflow more clear and you can use the PC in between scenes for other purposes instead of having to wait all day. And why would you want to send .avi files over the Net anyway? Mpeg is just invented for that.

Hi again zededd2000
Dont know anything about the sony prog. now you lost me I used Blender to composite my last little vid it has a great video editor/sequencer.
Did you manage to get any other test avi renders out with Daz ?

tjeb - 16 March 2013 01:43 PM

So…, now you do the ‘frame’ method like everyone, hope you render in .png to save filesize and use Virtualdub (really great program) for the final movie? BTW, did you check your disk space lately? All the .avi files consume a large amount of disk space that could be an indicator for the problem you mentioned in your first post.
I have another thing for you to consider: a scene that takes almost two minutes? Why don’t you chop your movie into several scenes, every scene using a different cameraview, making it much more pleasant to watch, and also making your workflow more clear and you can use the PC in between scenes for other purposes instead of having to wait all day. And why would you want to send .avi files over the Net anyway? Mpeg is just invented for that.

Well. the whole thing’s useless now. I won’t get paid for it. But I’m still working on the darned thing!

I would do the frame method if that was working… but so far, little success… i need to get virtualdub installed.
I render to external hard-drives. going to try rendering to the internal ones, see how well that does.

Sadly… this IS the split version haha the whole thing is about… well… would have been about ten minutes long.
The nature of the scene, it’s the same from different angles, but it needs to be all the angles. I’ll cut between them in one version, but they are released separate too.

I don’t send the .avi’s around much. I use .AVI for the offline use. .flv for a website. .mpg for emails. i use a complicated one i keep forgetting the extension for to send to a mobile device and a few other custom jobbies…

TapiocaTundra - 16 March 2013 07:28 PM

Hi again zededd2000
Dont know anything about the sony prog. now you lost me I used Blender to composite my last little vid it has a great video editor/sequencer.
Did you manage to get any other test avi renders out with Daz ?

Yeah… darned thing lost me too haha. can’t seem to get the sucker to even show me the problem :S

I’ve got very little experience in blender… lill complicated when I last used it (let’s say, it wasn’t open-source then…)

oh, the tests seem to work just fine… there’s something going wrong in the middle over the long-run… might be because i’ve used the computer in-render… i blame Vista. that usually is the answer XD

so far… still no luck. i’ve not been able to get a single copy of this damned animation rendered and to movie… the best I can do is apparently load the sucker in an image-viewer and go for a high-speed slide-show…

VeeDub should manage to get all your images into one movie file for you. I use it myself.

zededd2000 - 07 March 2013 06:15 AM

Richard Haseltine - 07 March 2013 06:04 AM

Render to an image sequence and use your video editing software to turn the images into a video - more control, you can redo a few frames that need tweaking without having to rerender the whole thing and you are protected from crashes and compression issues.

for 2,100 images? seriously? Although… that’s somewhat of a solution… i seriously lack the patience to find out how to flick-book over two thousand frames in Sony Vegas

I totally agree with you that is a bad solution and one time I accidentally did this and it completely totally froze my high tech computer

zededd2000 - 16 March 2013 06:47 AM

well… now i have a heap of image-sequences and or some reason when I put them into sony, half go upside-down, some just go black and others change size…
A learning curve is one thing… but something with right-angles isn’t fair when it was working before.

Since i have the images, i’ll be trying out this ‘vurtualdub’ as an alternative…
but for something that is apparently meant to be easier and just as fast, this has taken nearly two weeks longer than the first time it rendered.

“just because you have always done something one way does not make it better”
I know, but i am doing it that way for a reason. because I know it and am not going to start experimenting on something untill i have more time. since now i’m so behind on this piece’s deadline, i’m not going to get paid for it, i don’t think being more professional is much of a consolation prize!

yeah—I hear you. It doesn’t really work so just do it like this HAHA

FWIW, I render to an Image Sequence when animating in DS 4.5 and use Vegas (Movie Studio HD 11.0) for editing . It actually works great for me.

Here’s the procedure I follow:

1. Render in D|S to an Image Sequence (I believe you’ve done this already). BTW, I always export in .png format - I’ll address that later.

2. In Vegas, select Import Media from the Project menu.

3. When the Import Media dialog comes up, select Image Sequence at the Files of Type option.

4. Select the first image in the sequence (or the one you’d like your clip to start with).

5. Make sure the Open still image sequence box is checked. Also, verify that the number of frames is accurate to the right of this. If not, or you want to create a clip with only part of the sequence, manually adjust as necessary.

6. Next it will give you a Property dialog. I recommend leaving these all on default setting except for Tape name. Naturally, you should call it whatever makes the most sense to you.

7. Your new clip should now appear in your Project Media pane. You can now drag it down onto your timeline and edit as you would any other clip.

I know it may seem like a bunch of extra steps but that’s mostly because I’ve broken it down so much. Once you’ve done it once or twice you’ll see that it’s really only one extra step in the transfer process that will probably take no more than 20 seconds per clip.

As others have pointed out (several times in several ways), there are many advantages to importing Image Sequences as opposed to D|S created .avi files. But I’ll point out two that I find helpful when using Vegas (they probably apply to other NLE’s as well):

1. I don’t have to deal with .avi’s. Personally, I don’t care for that specific container/format. By importing as an Image Sequence, I can just deal with whatever format (.mp4 in my case) I prefer. This avoids dealing with the less than intuitive codecs included with D|S.

2. Alpha channels are preserved (assuming you don’t export as .jpg or .bmp). I use .png because, IMO, it has the best combo of ease of editing and control of transparency; but you could use .tif if you prefer. Alpha Channels may not be a big deal to you now but having the optional control is always a good thing. Chances are you’ll do something down the road where being able to edit your video in layers will be all but necessary,

BTW, this process should work (with little to no variation) in pretty much any version of Vegas - the person I learned this procedure from was using an old version of Vegas Pro (6 or 7?).

Also, not to rub salt in a wound, but upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 will make your life MUCH easier. Of course, it’s not necessary but then you don’t seem to be happy with Vista, so…

Anyway, I hope that helps.

-Damon

habgyp - 18 March 2013 03:21 PM

FWIW, I render to an Image Sequence when animating in DS 4.5 and use Vegas (Movie Studio HD 11.0) for editing . It actually works great for me.

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Just a quick question,  since you mention Sony Vegas Movie studio.  How many audio channels can you set up in that application?