The Quicktime animation codec doesn’t work in windows Vista. The video ends up having these horizontal colored bands. Has anyone else had this problem and would share the fix?
works for me. First, do you have QT Pro, and did you upgrade? If you did, bad news. The upgrade is defective. I had to downgrade to 7.3.1 and refuse any more helpful upgrade notices.
I am tempted to buy Quicktime pro version 7.3.1 but the free version still has the weird artifacts. I wonder if the activation code turns off the artifacts?
I have noticed there is a bug in quicktime and blender on windows. Only my bug is that blender renders the video at the frame rate / 10. Yes, isn’t that wierd, Even if I set the render to 30fps, I get a 3fps file using Quicktime 7.1.
So far, to date, I have not been able to get Blender to make a correct quicktime video file.
Does it make a difference when you use Qt with XP or Vista?
And does QT for Windows have the ProRes codec too? Because this one is brilliant!
Cheers
Does it make a difference when you use Qt with XP or Vista?
Well for me, quicktime works with blender on windows XP but doesn’t work on windows Vista (animation codec has horizontal artifacts, png codec has blank frames, tiff has super saturated colors, jpeg2000 codec crashes blender).
I would be more than content to use the lagarith codec for transparency but blender gives the message “can’t get an image”. It appears from other posts I have read in this forum that the ffmpeg library that blender uses doesn’t recognize lagarith. And I don’t think it is a vista issue because the same thing happens on both xp and vista.
Quicktime itself is just a wrapper. Which codec are you choosing (h.264, animation, etc.) from the Quicktime codes popup? Try a different one and see if you’re still getting the same bad result. Also, you can set Blender to FFMPEG in the Formats panel, then choose Quicktime in the new Video panel that pops up. It’s still Quicktime, but through FFMPEG, which might give you a better chance.
Which codec are you choosing (h.264, animation, etc.) from the Quicktime codes popup?
I want transparent background so I have tried animation codec, png codec, tiff, tga, and jpeg2000 codecs which all support alpha channel transparency. But each of these has problems in vista.
set Blender to FFMPEG in the Formats panel, then choose Quicktime in the new Video panel that pops up
I have tried ffmpeg and picked the quicktime format but I didn’t see the animation, png, tiff, etc. codecs there. I only see flashvideo1, xvid, h264, huffyuv, etc. Shouldn’t they be there?
QT ProRes422 is by far the very best (totally lossless compression, just like uncompressed but with a uge gain of space on the disk)… but, for some reason, the Alpha channel isn’t rendered with transparency when rendered from Blender.
Animation works pretty well (on Mac) though and good enough for 800x600 format at least.
If you have to watch after electricity issues… better render by images (also for higher quality)… But i’m no expert about what Windows handdles the best…
EDIT: H264 should be at leats as good as png’s… It’s the standart QT for the web (<< yes<< FOR the web) 
If you have to watch after electricity issues… better render by images (also for higher quality)
Yes, I do my final render to images but I need a .avi or .mov file to use as a transport between blender and vegas video because vegas doesn’t export png image sequences. This is actually what I am trying to do:
- use cinegobs keyer on my green screen footage and output to a png sequence
- open the png sequence in vegas and add glow effect to the actors
- export a video file from vegas with the alpha channel preserved
- bring the video with alpha channel into Blender to composite with the 3D scene.
- do a final render in Blender to a jpg sequence.
H264 should be at leats as good as png’s… It’s the standart QT for the web (<< yes<< FOR the web)
I don’t think H264 saves the alpha channel. It’s specs say it supports RGBA but I think this means it will display RGBA video but with a black background.
Daggone. I was going to suggest image sequences for retaining Alpha but apparently that’s not an option. Can Vegas use a straight RGB animation, and take a b&w second animation file for Alpha, because you can certainly get Blender to do that.
ETA: Just did a little googling, and it seems that Quicktime has a codec called “PNG”. At least I can choose that on the Mac. I don’t have a windows box with Quicktime on it right now, so I can’t confirm it works there too. However, if you can access it, it will support Alpha.
Just did a little googling, and it seems that Quicktime has a codec called “PNG”
I tried the png codec and it works great in windows XP but in VISTA every other frame is blank. I am so tempted to fork over the $30 to buy the quicktime pro to see if magically makes all these codecs work in VISTA but it just seems fishy that the free version might be sabotaged to get people to spend money.
Just so I’m clear, if you open that BLEND file on an XP computer running Blender you get every frame from Quicktime PNG, but that same BLEND on Vista gives you only every other frame?
Just so I’m clear, if you open that BLEND file on an XP computer running Blender you get every frame from Quicktime PNG, but that same BLEND on Vista gives you only every other frame?
If I create the .mov file with the PNG codec on a windows XP machine then the video will play correctly in Blender on both windows XP and VISTA machines.
If I create the .mov file with PNG codec on windows VISTA then the video will only play correctly in Blender on the windows XP machine.
Which version of Quicktime are you using? Apple is up to 7.2.5 (iirc).
Oooo! Try this – dump that video file onto an external HD or flash drive, etc., if you have one available. Then try to play it in Vista off the external drive. There is a problem with Vista, SATA hard drives, nVidia and video playback. Wacky but true.
Oooo! Try this – dump that video file onto an external HD or flash drive
I don’t believe it but that worked! I rendered a .mov file with png codec from vegas to a flash drive on windows Vista and then I textured a plane in blender (also in Vista) using the .mov file still on the flash drive and no blank frames. Thanks to you Harkyman for figuring that out. It is a crazy workaround but it does work. Have you heard anything about Apple’s plans to fix this SATA/nvidia/Vista problem?
Just that Apple blames nVidia, and nVidia blames Apple. 
If you don’t mind, go back and edit your first post, changing the title to:
Vista Quicktime problem – solved
For future searchers!
Hopefully there will be natural forces to get one or the other to fix the problem.
I know this thread is old, but I just stumbled across it while doing some PNG research. Vegas CAN export a PNG image sequence. [I have v6, so I can’t speak for earlier versions; but v6 and beyond should all be able to export PNGs.] See this thread for details:
Vegas exporting png image sequence
Just be sure to run the script, then click “Browse…” and then select PNG from the “Save as Type” drop-down menu.
Be sure to read the whole thread to understand some of the limitations of this method. There is also solution suggested that involves the DebugMode frame-server. This is easier to use than it sounds. Basically, once you install the FrameServer [a quick and easy install], you can export to it using “Render As…” just like any other Vegas export.