Ok, has anyone had any sucsess in using DivX to render to? Could someone point out the best settings? Mine always looks like garbage.
Please try to cover DivX 5.1
Mike Norton
ManO
I have had success with DivX 5.0.5 (so may not be relevant!) - but just wanted to say that it works very nicely for me. I’ve used the default settings, and set the bit-rate to 2064 kbps (I can’t remember whether this was the original default or whether I changed it somehow).
When you say it looks like garbage, what do you mean? Are you getting visual artifacts, slow frame rates or something else?
using the standard renderer to divx isn’t the best idea, each frame will be encoded indvidually, and the result will look worse, and be larger than the alternative.
encode to divx after creating the avi for smaller size, and a better looking result. I wouldn’t know how to do that (especially for free)
I would like a solution to that though
hence, I encode to mpeg. (bah!)
Thanks z3r0. That is what I was thinking. I have the encoding after figured out. I actully purchased Dr. DivX. Its pretty nice utility. Pluse I use it with my PVR stuff to make tv programs fit a CDR.
THanks for the info guys.
One other question, which is the best codec to render to? I have been rendering to uncompressed but on large projects I might run out of space. So how can I compress it without loosing quality?
Mike
Let me very much doubt that.
Martin
Unless your project utterly expandable, don’t compress at render time : render to individual images in a lossless format, preferably tga.
Use VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/index or VirtualDubMod http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/ (works faster on my machine) to compress.
Then, you essentially have three choices, but in any case you must do your own tests since nobody here has the same computer as you have and quality is so dependant on the power and overhead (routime workload) of the machine :
Make a short animation, 10 seconds is plenty enough. Put alot of detail/contrast in the objects but keep the background a rather plain and dark gradient. Make some thing move fast others slow. Have parts well lit others not so much. Output to tga. Make the experiences that you think you need : put the parameters settings in the file name to remember them. Compare.
1 pass with a fixed bitstream value
___The higher the value the better the quality ; start testing around 900. Higher is tougher on the cpu at reading time.
1 pass with a quality setting
___Obvious : try them all.
2 passes with 5 quality settings
___Just choose your quality settings and file size while taking into account that if you aim for a smallish file size/high quality you put a lot of load on the cpu at reading time. Then the end result may very well be, paradoxically, poor quality, freeze frames, crap.
Start with this : other parameters are less importants for the first trials.
Sorry but there are no miracle/omnipotent settings.
Unless your computer is very old and slow you should find your settings of choice. I succeed with a 750 MHz AMD T-Bird
Jean
Try rendering to the PNG format (Portable Network Graphics). It uses a lossless compression scheme. So, the file if smaller than the original and doesn´t loose ANY quality.
Alexandre Rangel
cool idea! I’ve been doing uncompressed tgas (force of habit, I gues) but they’re huge and nautilus can’t thumbnail them. pngs might be my ticket.
Oh yes, rendering to any movie file (‘cepting rendertests) is a mistake; You can’ t fix just one frame out of 1000 easily, And if you crash you have to rerender.