Easiest way to render a movie?

#1

Hi,

I’m trying to render out some basic animation, like turntables, camera panning, walk cycles, etc.

I know how to render still images with mental ray, however, I no next to nothing of putting the individual frames together.

Is there a way to do this in XSI with the built-in Illusion, for example, or how is this generally done?

Googling for this returns a lot of references to third party programs like After Effects and Final Cut, but I’m really just looking after a simple solution to render a simple movie and not really planning on spending more money on this :slight_smile:

Thanks!

#2

The easiest way is to load the image sequence into quicktime pro and save out a movie from there.

#3

Thanks,

At least that’s not a huge investment. But seriously, are there no free/built-in alternatives for doing this? It just seems like such a basic animation task…

#4

Maybe I misunderstand you, but the easiest (not necessarily best) way to create a movie is the one built-in into the render manager options:

XSIdocs: Rendering > Pass Rendering Options > Creating Movie Files (Windows Only)

#5

You can import image sequences into XSI’s own Flipbook.exe and export a quicktime or avi from there. You could also do it from VirtualDub (.bmp and .tiff only i think).

#6

I think we are talking about the same thing, it’s just that I heard somewhere that it would be “better” to render out an image sequence (rather than directly to a movie file) and then composite that together once the frames are done.
Could be completely unnecessary for such a basic animation I’m trying to achieve.

I must take a better look at flipbook also - I had completely neglected that.

Perhaps I have just been fooled by smart marketing of people selling compositing software :slight_smile:

#7

The built-in compositor can also write movie files from image sequence of course

the Create Movie option in the render option is actually a post-process that assembles the image sequence into an .avi, or .mov (32-bit version only)

#8

If you like to keep your sizes down, this app (I think it was recommended on xsibase) is fantastic (and completely free). You just render out an uncompressed AVI/MOV instead of sequence:

www.winnydows.com

Also check google on how to get proper gamma result in quicktime with h.264 compression.

t

#9

If you render out an image sequence and your system crashes then you only have to render the remaining frames after the crash. If you’re rendering out a movie file and your system takes a dump then you have to render the whole thing over again.

#10

Thanks for everybody!

I had to reinstall Windows and it took a while to get everything up and running again, but last night I managed to render out some frames and just tried them on flipbook… It worked! I was able to export my very first avi-video :slight_smile:

I guess I go on trying out the other formats next. If I want to export in quicktime format, I suppose I need to purchase Quicktime Pro, right?

#11

No it should just work if you export with quicktime as the selected option (as long as you’re using 32-bit). Would be worth doing some research into quicktime codecs though, as they vary dramatically. It would be worth buying quicktime pro anyway, as I find it always gives the best compression exporting a movie through there (export an uncompressed quicktime from softimage flipbook or use an image sequence).

#12

Try this:

  1. Once you are done rendering, right click on the file name in Render Manager. This will automatically open the sequence in Flipbook.

  2. Then use File / Export to render to a movie.

Hope this helps,
Ohmanoggin

#13

IMHO QuickTime Pro is a sham.
AFAIK the only thing it does is unlock the menus in the QuickTime player.
All the features of QuickTime Pro are available to applications that use QuickTime and buying Pro doesn’t change anything.

anyways, for rendering out animation , use the Animation Codec. It’s a lossless codec so there is nothing to loose and it will look sharp.

#14

Thanks for the tips!

I went and bought Quicktime Pro already. Flipbook kept giving me an empty (error)dialog, if I tried to export a quicktime movie, so I went an invested the 30 euros.

It still requires some (codec) studies, as Matt said - I tried “animation” and best quality, but it didn’t produce anything breath taking: if I compare the last rendered still frame and the end of the movie - the difference is obvious.

Also, there’s something funny about the the gamma (my guess) of the movie: it’s heavily overexposed :slight_smile:

EDIT: after some trial-and-error experimenting I managed to get a fairly nice QT-movie out of Flipbook after all. Is there an “optimal” format for the still frames? I used PNG (RGB, 8bits), but I’m not sure if it might be the reason for the overexposure problems?

#15

They address a similar problem here: http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/you-fix-h-264-brightness-contrast-issue-t13215.html

Don’t know if it will help.

#16

Thanks for the tip!

That sounds exactly like my problem, but I also just found out that exporting from Flipbook somehow avoids the overexposure automatically - I’m pretty happy with the results now :slight_smile:

#17

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