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Tasp
05-01-2008, 07:50 PM
Background (feel free to skip) - So I've been tinkering in maya for a while now and lately I've been getting into animation. I've got a short animation all set up and have been trying to figure out how to export that animation into a small movie file I can show my peers/friends/family. However I've been having serious problems exporting an .avi file from maya and after doing some research I've found that most people suggest using a program like after effects to make an animation movie. So I got the free trial and am messing around in it, and looking at tutorials, but most of them don't seem to address my situation.

From what I can see after effects is usually for editing clips, well I don't have clips I have about 150 frames of rendered screens from maya (hoping to run this at 24FPS). As I said before every time I try to export an .avi file it refuses to open and I can't seem to find a codec that will read maya's wierd little version of .avi

So my question is Is after effects a good program for quickly compiling these images into a movie? If so can someone point me towards some tutorials on how do this? I'm going through the tutorial page at the top of this forum, but most of them are talking about visual FX, editing clips etc. I need to learn how to take still frames and make them into a movie....

Feel free to message me or post here, and thank you very much for any/all advice.
scrimski
05-01-2008, 08:13 PM
So my question is Is after effects a good program for quickly compiling these images into a movie? Not exactly the best, but OK.
If so can someone point me towards some tutorials on how do this? I think this is so basic there aren't even tutorials about this(at least I don't know any). Read the manual, search for "Preparing and importing footage", "creating compositions" and "rendering and exporting"
It's a 5 minute read for a 10 second job.
Tasp
05-01-2008, 11:00 PM
Thanks for the suggestion Scrimski, I figured out what I need to do thanks to a few tutorials and a quick read of the manual (which I neglected to download when I got the trial version).
dwigfor
05-02-2008, 01:06 AM
If you just wanted to compress rendered files from Maya, you might as well skip AE ($1000) and go with QT:Pro ($30). Which codec are you rendering to? I usually send my compressed stuff as QT..

Also, I suggest rendering an image sequence from Maya (I prefer TGA with RLE compression-lossless, so no quality loss). That way, if it crashes during rendering, you don't need to start from beginning. You can start where it crashed..
Tasp
05-02-2008, 01:41 AM
Yea I have no intention of purchasing AE so thanks for the heads up on a cheaper option dwigfor- also I'm not sure but I think that's a zentraedi in your avatar, nice pic!
scrimski
05-02-2008, 01:53 AM
You might want to try VirtualDub.
http://www.chip.de/downloads/VirtualDub-1.7.8_12994844.html
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05-02-2008, 01:53 AM
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