Greetings,
Is there a way to get Combustion to recognize DPS files for footage and output?
(DPS files are DPS’s proprietary media format for their DDRs such as Reality/Velocity etc)
I find it strange that they directly support Reality as a framebuffer, but not for final rendering or incoming sequences.
Tanks!
Hi gemcap,
the biggest advantage of the dps reality/velocity hd recorder over others (like digisuite for example) is, that it comes with the virtual file system. This cheats windows in a very clever way.
Navigate to the drive DPS_VFS:\ via win explorer. You will see several folders like BMP, DPS, IFF, PIC, RAS, RAW, RLA, SGI, TGA, TIF, VPB. This represents all image formats you can put on and get from the dps.
After a sequence is recorded it is physically on disk only as native *.dps file in the DPS_VFS:\DPS\Volume\Subfolder Folder, but virtually the same file structure is under the other folders but there as single frame sequence in the appropriate format.
So when you want to get footage from the dps you can navigate f.e. to DPS_VFS:\TGA\Volume\Media\clip.dps and open that folder you will see the single frames clip0001.tga, clip0002.tga and so on. Media and clip are name examples. You can choose the foldername and clipname when you record or when you create a spool file your application shall render to.
Because combustion is able to read and write sequences of images it is ideal to use it in combination with the dps.
Best regards
georgy
Thanks for the reply gp,
Yeah, I actually am familiar with the VFS, but I have had problems in the the past accessing the drive that way. Reading files is not too bad, though MAX tends to get upset since it can’t write an IFL in that dir. The workaround is a tad tedious.
Writing files though, doesn’t this require media file creation beforehand, which needs a frame count, quality rate etc, to be pre-determined?
Regardless, you’re right, I haven’t really experimented with that in C2, thanks again!
G
Hello gemcap,
yes, that’s sad but right. You’ll have to create an empty spool file before you can render to it. And you have to determine the compression and the lenght. But usually I know what length I want, when I render, ;-} and so it is not really a problem for me.
If you are afraid of compression artefacts, just stay uncompressed.
And I would not put other files on the reality than the formats the VFS can read/write. So IFL (what is this???) will not work, I think.
With combustion I never had problems concerning the dps. You just have to decide if the sequence numbering starts with 1 or 0 and how many digits for framenumbers are the minimum. This you can edit in the DPS Hardwaremanager under the file system tab.
Best regards
Georgy
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