When rendering animations do you do images or video output?
Testing6790
Posts: 1,091
Just curious what you guys do when rendering animations. I try to do the video file, but sometimes the rendering takes so long that it makes more sense to do images and just do the rendering over multiple days. I just finished a 3700 frame animation and I'm wondering if it's even worth rendering it...
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Images. If the render crashes or there's a problem, it's easier to pick up or fix. You can make an animation from image sequences in almost any video editor and you are not stuck with a particular codec. You can also adjust images, add to them in a compositor, etc.
Yeah, I've been doing that more and more often recently. When I started I didn't really care, and just having the animation rendered was enough for me. I recently rendered a ~1500 frame animation to a video and I noticed that some clothing clipped through a surface and that was all I could see afterwards. I ended up completely re-rendering it.
I like to render and save to avi using Microsoft uncompressed codex. which is a defaults codex for almost all video editors.
I do avi because for me its much faster. , its a heck of a lot faster when it comes to film editing not having to put together 1000's of PNG to make a 30 seconds scene. plus not to mention AVI is much easier to work with in fx programs like after effects. you can still do post work to your png's files before you save it to avi, if you go to the temp render file located in the daz program. I moved mine to the desk to for easier access. but anyways after your done your post work you just hit save to avi and Bing-go one file instead of 300 pngs to deal with
I can render a 300 key-frames avi @ 30kfps in 1920 x 1080 HD using 3 characters a huge atmosphere and a ue2 light usually in about 3 hours give or take a hour if i build fx into the scene.
which takes me about the same amount of time if I do it in a png sequence rendered one at a time for each keyframe.. .. the only difference is I only have to deal with one 10 second avi scene instead of putting together 300 png's in a numbered order to make the same film scene. that alone is a major time saver. not to mention heck of a lot easier to organize in your movie build file.
But that's just my opinion, of the way I do thing
Image sequence, always.
Aside from codex issues, there's much more you can do with stills images that aren't easy to do to a video file. I can run a batch process on png's to add background or other such details, apply postworking and so forth. If I get a little pokethrough somewhere I can also fix it and only have to render one frame instead of the entire sequence.
There's just too much risk involved in putting all your eggs in one basket. There's no real difference in render time either. The time Daz takes to compile your AVI file is about the same time it takes to load an image sequence into something like Virtualdub and create an AVI of your own.
I alot of user seem to forget this or do not know that there is a temp render file, that all the rendered PNGs are stored in when you go to render in avi movie format. that you can copy and past those images to another file to save as back up of your avi movie file in case you need the files
Edit- add
I'll posted this pictorial for those who don't know this information.
I did this with 30 keyframes and 1 light at 1920 x 1080 hd the avi movie files wasd 5 megs the 30 pngs were 90 megs and i had a back up file of the pngs
2 more pictures
I should have mention also that you can do post work to the pngs before saving the avi fle if you needed to fix some minor things .
to me hard drive space is a premium and I much rather edit 1 avi file especially if i'll be working with it in Adobe after effects, Rather than have all those pngs to deal with first.
you can also copy the temp render folder that hold all the avi pngs as back up to the avi movie file.
But this is how i do my films its much faster and i still have back up of the pngs if i need them. anyways that is it in a nut shell
I have taken to compiling my image series in Hitfilm 2 express lately which was a facebook "like" freebie
am considering buying Hitfilm one day as it is very good.
If I name the frames alphabetically I can even import them stored in the same folder.
Otherwise I group scenes in folders.
I had the issue of my projects becoming too big for windows live moviemaker, once I got to 40 or more avi files compiled using virtualdub from image series totalling 20 minutes it just could not cope.
I still use it for smaller ones.
I render audio avi's of 1x1 pixels with only actors if needed to then extract the wav file in Vdub if I use mimic live or something in a way too complex to match up the audio to image series.
Mostly though I avoid this by starting takes at import of wav files for mimic or mimic live recordings, I rarely do long coversation full scenes in Carrara even and certainly not DAZ even with Octane. Facial closeups is the way to go edited in after. Films do it with actors after all.
Gads Windows movie maker is a joke ain't lol.. it only has what 5 tracks max ..lol and you can't export in HD, limited what you can do with the sound tracks. etc etc. etc..lol
the only reason I went with adobe premiere because it came part of the Adobe creative suite premium cs5. I was using sony Vaga for a while and then tried cinema 4d trial version. which i didn't want to invest in all the plugins for. if i bought it
i heard that premiere elements is very good editor tool for film editing & under a $100 bucks. lot of people talk about using it.
what i like about adobe premiere is the sound editing with the smart sound equalizer. the menu builder for making cd's and blu-ray disk
Plus being able to move, add , delete and edit movie tracks even just part of the movie keyframes has spoiled me on using anything else for film editing.
plus Adobe premiere allows me to bridge SWF & flv flash files or AE files into my projects , BTW I am finding out I really stink at after effects..lol
Windows live moviemaker as opposed to the windows moviemaker included with some versions of windows (not mine) does do HD
the main reason I use it is file size for youtube.
It does tend to compress to a smaller size than Hitfilm etc.
Isn't there a free Sony Vega Pro trial? I don't think that has a size cap. I don't have it, but I thought the trial was pretty great from what I've heard.
Hey guys, Just wanted to thank you for this discussion which I chanced on. Had not thought of rendering to image series but wow does it make a long render less risky and less fuss. I was always running up against 10 second limits and other glitches, but this way makes it so much easier. Luckily, my video edit program makes a snack of importing single frames to stitch into the final movie. Just completed a 1501 frame 4k sequence using it. 11.5 hours to render. About 1 minute to import all the frames and 20 minutes to export the 4k movie. Easy-as. Cheers, Lx
I don't do much animation but when I do I always render to image series. As for a video editor, it might not be very well publicised but Blender has a decent Video Editor too and I prefer it to either of the free utilities from Microsoft or Apple (I have a PC and an iMac).
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/photo-video/best-free-video-editing-software-2016-2017-3614829/
Images for a whole slew of reasons. Primarily if you get a few bad frames it's easier to fix it on images than it is to fix it as a video. Plus you can pre render backgrounds and then composite a separate layer with the characters to speed up production times.