I’ve read so much about the renowned openEXR formats that seem to have a bright future for further releases of blender. However, I’m still in the dark as to how to make use of this mighty format.
I read somewhere about Photoshop having plugings that allow you manipulate exr images. Is this typically how its done? What about for animation? If you output to 1000 exr files, how does one make adjustments to things like exposure for all of those files? Surely not one at a time, so is there a certain software used to do that? Is the exrdisplay program i read about on openexr.com relevant at all to any of this?
Also, once outputted to exr from blender, how is that typically packaged for a movie file? I understand most video editing software doesn’t even recognize this format yet.
Any information anyone has would be incredibly useful.
Actually, I have already read many of your posts regarding EXR on this very forum while researching the topic. You seem to be quite the spokesman for the matter and I appreciate your help.
I’ll have to read up on multi-layering, I’m still unaware to it’s advantages and how to implement its usefulness. All I know is that it has something to do with making it a heck of a lot easier when it comes to tweaking a rendering that saves you from having to re-render. I’ve been told that its analogous to having layers in photoshop, where as without it it would be like working in photoshop with no layers at all.
Cant let rambo have all the fun here. see also http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Compositing_Blur_the_Background as well as a post about a robot running in between some boxes. Basically you render the robot running, saving as an EXR sequence, and the boxes positioned in front and behind him. When you composite, he runs Between them, since the Z info is preserved. very cool way to do compositing POST rendering…actually, the only real way without resorting to tricks.
You render out the animation as a frame set simply by specifying the EXR format in the Format panel in the render buttons. Blender creates an EXR image for every frame named Yada-0001.exr, Yada-0002.exr… Then, in the Image input node, or in the Video Sequence editor, insert an image but instead of right clicking on a single file, right click and drag over the range of frame images. Blender then loads that whole sequence in. see the appropriate sections of the wiki for more info on how to use EXR images.
To pack the EXR images into an AVI or QT file, simply select AVI as the output format, and when you ANIMate, blender creates the movie file for you.
Not sure if we can easily use the format for animation just yet. I really would like better gray-scale output. Even nicer dithering, but then you get weird artifacts in animation.
I had no problem running my EXR’s through the video sequence editor to .avi output when I was trying to test a few things prior to the final product.
Of course before I do the final animation I will have already converted to a different format (I am considering png at the moment).
The only purposes for me to use the EXR was to get something with a Z buffer output to adjust things like DOF or motion blur via composite nodes. When I composite I will output to the png and then throw those png’s into the sequence editor and, viola.