Animation to Video Not Recognized

I saved my Blender Animation file - 1600 frames - as a .avi raw file. But it is not recognized by Power Director, my video editing software. I converted it to an .mp4, but same problem. Are there any special numbers or boxes I need to check to create a video file that Power Director will recognize?

I don’t know much about Power Director, but might I suggest you render individual png frames and put them together in Power Director?
That’s the only suggestion I’ve got at this moment.

That’s what I’m hearing from the experts. Thanks for the response.

Yeah, seems to be the standard way of doing things. Plus if Blender get a hiccup during the rendering process all the previous frames will be fine, allowing you to pick up where you left off.

One thing I noticed is that when I save a file as .png files, the ‘duration’ of each of the files is exactly the same, so the project has to be re-timed using individual cells or groups of cells. Interesting way of doing things.

Well, It depends on the frame rate. 24 frames a second is going to be 24 png frames.
I’m not sure what kind of animation your rendering, but I’m not sure why you’d need different frames to have different durations. Unless your making something more anime/stop motion like where the frames have different durations sometimes?
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding you!

Oh, I sometimes like to alter the speed of selected sections of a video. Breaking the film into .png files is interesting in that it is a different way to alter the speed of a section of video, as opposed to slicing off a section of a video file and altering its duration. If that makes any sense.

Ah, that makes sense. Well I hope that it isn’t too cumbersome for you to work that way.

Not at all. Opens up all sorts of possibilities.

An image (frame) does not have duration, nor does a video clip frame have duration. Speed is just a factor for rate of switching frames, and it makes no difference whatsoever whether these frames are separate files or in a container like video file. Video file contains frame rate as a metadata and this is taken by editing software as the frame rate intended for playing back that set of frames. But nothing prevents you from overriding this.

It is a concept people sometimes seem to struggle with, so repeat it to yourself until it starts to make sense: video is an ordered sequence of still images.

I’ understand what you are saying. I’m just saying that each still image has a duration of 5 seconds, which can be altered individually, or as selected groups. That seems to be the default duration of each .png image when animation is saved as .png files. So a 200 frame animation will provide 200 .png files, each with a duration of 5 seconds. Maybe different ways of describing the same thing.

How still images are handled depends on software and usually you can change the default length in settings. Longer than single frame is an editing feature, not property of image. It is tedious to zoom in on single frame length to stretch it, so they are created longer in timeline because usually stills are used as stills, not as a sequence, an are held longer. Usual case is titles, graphics etc. In any NLE worth its weight if you load an orderd sequence of stills (with ordering based on frame numbers) it is handled as clip, which is identical to loading a video file.