rendering stills to video

[weatherhead]

ok, this may be a bit OT, but I think some of you video buffs here might be able to help me so here goes.....

 

I am currently involved in the production of a small scale film, for which I am playing a large part in the production aspect. I have used blender3d to produce some CGI which will be eventually incorporated into part of the film. I started off with the simple movements, and was very happy with the animations, but once I had added all the icing (particle effects, etc) when I rolled the thing out to render the animation, playback was very jumpy in parts, even after several plays through it. This happens when I render to image stills, or render to an AVI file and play it in an external player. I have a feeling my antiquated graphics card (geforce 2 MX440) is to blame for the jumpiness on graphically heavy areas.

 

Now my question is this - I think I could have more control over tweaking the performance of the video if I was rendering to stills from blender and piecing together the footage in a separate program. How would I go about doing this? I am fairly competent using AP, but at the moment only my 'nix rig is running properly, till I fix the doze box. I am just wondering if there's a handy little program to make vid files from lots of stills........

 

Thanks in advance for your ideas or suggestions :D

[peternewman]

Quicktime Pro has the ability to import a sequence of sequentially named images, with a variety of frame rates to choose from. But it is very fussy and will only import files with the same name, but a different number. However there are lots of free renaming utilities around.

 

HTH

 

PN

[weatherhead]

thanks I will give it a try, see if there's a demo or something :** laughs out loud **:

[CAB]

Sorry for this, bit late but I saw your post.

 

Think about the following: is the programme 4:3 or widescreen. If its widescreen is it 4:3 and letterboxed (black bars top and bottom) or FHA. it its FHA you could render out Tif stacks at say 1024 x 576 which is true widescreen.

 

Then download the trial of Adobe ae, import the tif stacks and output at 720 x 567 for PAL, this then keeps the pixel aspect ratio correct and the larger 3D exports will show up any artefacts which you can correct.

 

Really what you need is to find out the native playback device, if it is PowerPoint you need to export from AE as AVI then import into either Cleaner or WMV encoder and out put a WMV9 either MP4 or standard .wmv.

 

IF playback is from tape get the stack files to a post house for them to get to tape, far quicker than we can do at home.

 

PowerPoint can get any QT file into a slide, you just have to know how, and have a fast enough computer. However I can say this PowerPoint prefers MPEG1/2 or WMV files much more and WMV 9 files are much smaller than any of the others.

 

When it comes to artefacts in 3D, I only know 3DSMAX but then I use Brazil renderer

so there...we each have our cross to .....

[weatherhead]

thanks a lot CAB, some of what you say is really helpful to me :** laughs out loud **: . I'm sure a lot more of it would be really helpful, but I'm a real newbie to this sort of stuff.

 

When you say native playback, do you mean what it will end up on? If so, it'll end up being edited into our final cut from the cameras which are mini - dv types. It's intended to be 4:3 I think. I will ask the guy on the production team who knows about this stuff if it'll help, I am just putting this together cos I have a little experience in making high quality digital images, but I've never really done any animation work. The editing is being done in Adobe Premiere, so I need something I can import into that eventually, ideally. The idea being that in the end the whole show will be printed to DVD....

 

You suggested that I render some tif stacks. Well I did that, and got them at what I think is the right size. Now I'm just not quite sure how to make them into video, that was my problem. So by adobe ae I assume you mean adobe after effects? I'm downloading that now, so I'll get back to you on how I do with that.

 

Once again, thanks for the advice.