When I try to stick all my animations that I’ve made in Blender, into Director 7, or any other avi editor, I can’t open them due to them being a wrong compression format.
I have the hang of the codec changing in the blender render buttons, but I can’t find the best one that won’t give a compression error.
I wouldn’t work with DivX in this case. Use something like Motion-JPEG oder a free variant of it: Huffyuv. DivX does a lot of compression, this makes it a good choice for final movies to be put on the web or sent by email, but to be able to mix movies together you should work with as little lossy compression as possible.
To put movies together you can for example work with VirtualDub or TMPEnc which can do MPEG. Or if you wanna add some transitions and stuff go for the free MovieXone from aist.com.
Idefix, thanks but which is the best codec to set Blender to render the avi in, just tried the Microsoft video 1 , and the result is too appaling to use.
The best might be to get mjpeg from Pegasus which is about $20 but worth the money because it is really (!) fast and great to cut in any nonlinear moviesoftware.
Or you could try to install the free lossless Huffyuv-Codec from
Do you use the Mjpeg codec when rendering animations from Blender?
And I don’t want to lose any quality until after the movie has been edited together and is at it’s final stage.
I am using Director 7, after effects 4, satori film fx, Premier 5.1 then Logic for audio mixing etc, will these then support the Mjpeg and other codecs?
If you have you need to go to the render buttons, and where you normally have Targa, left click and hold this button until you get the list, then select AVI CODEC.
Then just below that button select codec will appear in staed of Quaility 95.
Again left click and hold this button to make the codec list appear.
Assuming a video (rather than a movie) would suffice, I’ve had very good luck with Main Actor. I import the AVI anims with no difficulty, edit them, and export them in a variety of other formats.
I am mostly working with mjpeg if a need to work on the rendered movie afterwards. For testing I sometimes also use DivX but most of the time I am working with mjpeg.
About your software I can only guess whether they will support mjpeg or not: Most such software under windows work with all of the system wide installed codecs, or they even have their own mjpeg codec already built in, because mjpeg is quite well known and often used. To be absolutely shure check your manuals or take a look on their webpages, usually it is stated what codec support a certain software package ships with or whether system codecs are supported.
Concerning quality loss: mjpeg usually is lossy, like JPEG for images. But on the Pegasus site (link in my previous post in this thread) you will find other codecs which support lossless compression. Check those out to get maximum quality. For me mjpeg with the best quality settings work well enough.
If you can… go uncompressed avi… It depends on your final destination with the video. If it is for VHS… you can get away with a bit of compression… but if your going to DVD you’ll want’ all the quality you can get up to the last point of compression… and for the web… compress compress compress… Best yet… for true production quality video… render individual frames. Just incase your render breaks you don’t have to start over from the very beginning…
I have to go with Martin on this one. Numbered stills in uncompressed TGA format will give you the best result in the final animation. Just load the numbered files into your favorite video editing software (assuming that it can handle this) and let it do the codec compression for you.
Other advantages include:
Ability to stop / resume rendering anytime you want
Ability to do frame by frame post production (batch processing)
Hey sure it eats up your HD, but extrra gigs are getting cheaper all the time, so that excuse is starting to lose its validity
Raw/uncompressed means that the image is exactly as it was rendered. Huffyuv is lossless compression - like zipping a file - and it makes the avi about 1/2 of the size, without affecting the quality. As you probably know, JPEG’s can have adjustable quality from high compression with low image quality to low compression with high image quality.
Pegasus has some good codecs, as idefix said - they have a lossless codec as well as a MJPEG codec… when you set that to maximum quality it appears to be lossless (no loss in image quality) - maybe the colours vary by a fraction of a shade still though… but I can’t notice it. You can use their MJPEG codec in Blender 2.23 (AVI JPEG).
Help needed!!!