Rendered video format question

[ExP]

Hey iceycat25,
Regarding the second question about rendering format I'm sure anyone in this forums would strongly discourage you from rendering your animations in any "video" format like .avi or .mov
The best solution is to always render using uncompressed single-frame sequences of files like .tga or .tiff
You can then use any editing / compositing app or even Max's own RamPlayer or Video-Post to save your anim out to the video format and compression of your choice.

About the thumbnails question I would check into general image and media viewers like XnView. I think some are able to dispaly thumbnails and play both avi and mov files.

Cheers

[ahmedsheeraz]

yes...always use tga (uncompressed) or tiff for output your work then make it a movie in any video editing/compositing software....I always load my work in combustion and do some color correction or some other touches to my footage. As far as your first question is concerned, consult microsoft if they listen to you..... :)

[iceycat25]

Hmm, thanks I think I had heard of that image trick somewhere before but forgotten it or something. So I will use that for rendering then, but what about when I do finally composite the images into somekind of movie file after the fact. I only know about a small handfull of compression codecs, is MPEG-4 in .Mov format a good choice? I'm not too worried about file size, but I don't want to go uncompressed animation format unless someone knows of a really persuading reason why I should. There's like a dozen compression options under either .mov, or .avi and I really don't know which ones are the best to use for them. ( I know Cinepak sucks though, lol) Thanks.

[SoLiTuDe]

hehe... mpeg 4 is good, but i've noticed that some of my friends have trouble opening them in their quicktime... could be their install or something... haven't tested it out much yet. Using Sorenson 3 is pretty good quality/size ratio, but the size a little on the larger side. Don't go all the way to best on quality settings if you want a good size file. For avi's i would say use divx... it's pretty universal now. and also you can get the windows media encoder from microsoft and use that to make wmv's... though they're stupid and don't support image sequences... but you'd be covered in all aspects of the computer world if you're worried about people d/ling them from you. Cleaner can output to all of them for you also... you can set up an output profile and just add your image sequence and viola! you have 3 files from an image sequence... pretty sweet. But it costs money of course hehe... and combustion has batch processing too, so you could at least do the avi and quicktime....

[ExP]

I personally like WindowsMedia9 HD a lot. Expecially because I mostly work in 2K or HD res and this gives me good enough quality and realtime playback.
Also the encoder is free...

However if you prefear QT I would go with either Mpeg-4 or Sorenson

[iceycat25]

Thanks guys the info has been real helpful. So is there any way at all to have my quicktime movies display thumbnail images like the .avi's do? I have decided that the .mov files are just all the way around better, and I like the quicktime player better than windows media player anyway. So I just need to know if I can make thumbnails so I'm not looking at a folder of a hundred quicktime icons now, lol!

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