Animation Renders are HUGE

#1

Hello everyone, I’m new to Vue and really 3D world creation in general. I decided to skip over the Easel version of Vue and go straight to xStream, but I’ll admit I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment. I’m working through my issues one at a time, but am having some trouble with this one:

When I render an animation, the file size is HUGE! I have a 10 second clip that I’m rendering at 1920x1200, and it’s 1.3 Gigs in size!. I’m rendering it at the setting of ‘Final’, and in the middle section I’m rendering it in ‘color’, rendering it to an .avi file using the Divx Codec.

Is there another technique, codec, or setting that I should be using to render animations to get me to a resonable file size?

Thanks for your help

#2
  1. How is file size depend of program type? :wink:
  2. No reason to render directly to AVI - format. Wrong way. Always. You need render to sequence of files.
  3. What’s a kind of video you need in final target? I think, 1920x1200 - is a little bit inproper format.
  4. What’s settings you set for DivX? Much better to use for encoding other special programs, like Edit system or conversion programs (Virtual Dub, canopus ProCoder, etc.)
#3

I appreciate the response, I’m not sure I understand any of those questions enough to respond intelligently.

All I want to do is take an animation that I create in Vue and be able to play it as a movie file. beyond that, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just picked 1920x1200 since that’s the resolution of my monitor.

If there’s a better way to render or better settings or another program, please let me know.

Thanks

#4

Wisky is right…better to render to individual JPG files-- quality set to 95 should be good enough.

Let’s see, you want to render 30fps at 10 seconds which is 3000 frames. A JPEG at around 90-95 quality are around 300K apiece. 300K times 3000 frames equals 900,000K or around a Gig of data, so it sounds about right what you’re getting.

DIVX is of course a better compressor than JPEG as it also uses temporal compression (compression between frames), but perhaps your compression settings are very high.

Once you have a bunch of JPEG files, you can use many programs to sequence them to a movie file and export at whatever size and compression you like.

#5
  1. 10 seconds ay 30 fps - is ONLY 300 frames. :wink:

Also, IMHO - using a source files with “unrecovered” compression, like jpeg - it’s bad practice. And jpeg not support alpha channel.
Using lossless (internal) compression in uncompressed formats like *tga or *png - much better.

#6

So what you’re saying is to NOT render the video file directly from Vue, but to instead render to a sequence of images? What software would you reccomend to use to sequence the images together into a video format?

#7

Not to mention the “final” setting isn’t the best for shorts, read the manual bit on customising you render setting and that should cut the file size a tad and render time significantly, I have around 10 different “user” render settings for different enviroments and I pick the best and then customise it further.

#8

Any Edit program for your taste.
Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas, Canopus Edius, etc.

#9

DOH! Thanks for catching that :slight_smile:

Yep, I know, but there are a number of things to be concerned about when using uncompressed frames.

  1. They take up SIGNIFCANTLY MORE SPACE on disk.
  2. If one is going to use Alpha, then fine, but it’s difficult to use alpha channels in Vue as the sky is the only part which is typically in the alpha channel. And, the clouds are not part of the alpha information. If you really want to use alpha data, my suggestion is to render to PSD format and choose the channels you want to keep.
  3. You need to do a Photoshop diff and check out the real difference between an 8 bit RGB bmp and a 95 quality JPG at 1900 x 1200 resolution. I’ll bet the average person cannot see ANY difference. And post processing a 95 Q Jpeg doesn’t compound artifacts in any significant way.
#10

for test renders, you should render at lower resolutions. What you are rendering at is essentially HD res; while there’s nothing inherently wrong with rendering at HD res, it takes up a lot of time and a lot of disk space (as you have found out). Render at 800x600 for starters (or even lower - I render at 320x240 - to my eyes there’s nothing wrong with that resolution) and save the high-res renders for when the project is truly done.

As for saving the renders, what everyone said above is true - render to frames first and let other programs compile the frames into a video file. There are a range of programs to accomplish this, from free VirtualDub to expensive Adobe Premiere / Final Cut Pro / After Effects Pro. You can also compile the frames with Vue itself, but its a bit of a pain. If you have another 3D program like Lightwave (it’s what I use, but other programs should be able to do this) compile the frames by loading the frame sequence as a background plate and then having the 3D program render out to a video file (not as good a solution as using a program like Virtual Dub or Premiere, but it DOES work.

As for what codec to choose - try them all. See which works best for you. AVI DV is probably a good all-rounder that’s compatible with a lot of programs. AVI Cinepak is another all-rounder whose advantage is that every Windows machine can play it. Rendering out Quicktime MOV is also good, and allows easy access to MPEG-4 .h264 for smaller sizes and retention of image quality.

#11

Thanks for this post, it was helpful. I think I’ve got everything down now except finding a program to compile all the frames into a movie clip. The Adobe solutions are out of my price range at the moment, and VirtualDUB doesn’t appear to do what I need, unless someone has some pointers on that.

#12

Geez…I found what i need right there inside Quicktime. I just render the images out individually, and then Quicktime has the Image Sequence option that’s very straightforward and easy to work with.

#13

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