First off, let me give you some specs. I’m presently using blender2.30 (though I’ve been using blender since ver. 1.7x–so although I’m not a complete newbie, I still don’t know a whole lot about blender’s functionality). I’m working on a WinXP PC with a Pentium III processor, and 256MB RAM at 497MHz. Now my problem, which has persisted throughout my entire use of blender, is that my animations appear jumpy when played in Windows Media player. A while back, I used bink/smacker to compress and add sound to my animation/videos, but they still looked somewhat grainy–expecially when I resized the animation/video to a larger size during playback in Windows media player. Now I’m using VirtualDub to do the same things that I used to do with Bink/Smacker, but the same problems persist.
Now to the point: I’m saving my animations as “AVI Raw” most of the time. I’ve also used blender to convert the avi into a divx (using the “AVI Codec”) --similar to what VirtualDub does–but both of these formats are jumpy when played back in Windows Media player, and grainy when resized to something similar to the “PC” aspect ratio size. What am I doing wrong? Should I use a different (preferably free) application to playback my animations. Should I be saving these animations/videos as something other than “AVI Raw” or “AVI codec”? I generally render with the “PC” aspect ratio selected, and my animation settings are 25fps, OSA/8, 100% (defined render size), and Quality:100. I just want my animations to appear the same size as my still renders (the “PC” aspect ratio size), and I want the animations to be clear (no grainy-ness) and smooth (no jumpy-ness). Please help me.
I don’t know much about the subject but here’s some
tips:
First of all, keep in mind that video files are very high-cpu power
(and space) demanding
With a P3-500 you’re a bit in the “low side”, specially if you’ve an
old graphics card
And, please, even with a workstation, playing 640x480 AVI’s at 25 fps
is a hard job ( for the machine of course:) ).
So if you want top quality, there’s no choice!! Render in AVI raw
But just to show your work for the Pixar or the like guys
To show your master pieces to the rest of the world, you must “cut” in
size ( read some docs, please, some file formats have a “prefered” size")
and maybe in FPS.
Do some tries.
Bye
Thanks for responding to my post guys, but no one has answered my question yet. How do I get rid of the jumpiness overall, and how do I get rid of the graniness of my animations at larger resolutions? When other blender artist post their animations on their websites, they play fine when I download them and open them with Windows Media Player. Do I need a new faster computer, or am I doing something wrong in blender, or am I using bad playback software (Windows media player), or am I saving the animation wrong (AVI Raw), All of the above???
What gives?
Not sure entirely what you mean by jumpiness, could you post one of these animations?
But…I’ll try to help anyways… you might just need more frames. A 10 frame animation with 25 FPS wouldn’t look too nice. You could try extending animations for many many more frames than necesary and then slowing them down afterwords in another program maybe? Or just set FPS up a lot higher and render more frames.
I had the same problem (I think) but it was just because my 2 key frames were allways too close together… The object would move very fast (too fast) and would appear jumpy as it moved quite a bit every frame.
Hope all that’s correct, and hope it helps you in some way.
AVI Raw is jumpy because it requires a high bandwidth in transfering movie Disk->memory->videocard->Monitor, so unless you have a very powerfull higly optimized machine OR your AVI has a small frame size (320x240?) hence a low bandwidth it will be jumpy
2 - Granularity
AVI Codec is granular because of compression artifacts. Compression reduce file size AND bandwidth, hence solves jumpiness (unless your PC is crap) BUT needs more CPU for decoding and, since bandwidth depends on quality, the smalle the worse (more granular)
Now, your PIII 500 is not a powerfull machine, mine at home sometimes jumps on playing DVD, and the graphic card has MPEG decoding!!! This means that you are beyond your hardware limits.
Solutions:
1 - change PC
2 - render smaller animations
3 - Burn your animations on a DVD and watch then on TV (this is very cool to show parents/girlfriends)
