Any Mac users advise what video format they use for output (especially for compressed files suitable for posting to the web) and, if the chosen format isn’t a blender default (Quicktime, AVI-raw, AVI-jpeg) how you went about getting your format to work.
In the hope of improving output I downloaded 3ivx and installed it - but it mostly doesn’t work and when it does, it’s disappointing (unless I’m doing something wrong).
In my test case, 3ivx renders a file if I set the size to 75% but at 100% or 50% it renders a corrupted alpha-channel (white objects, black background). Even the 75% render, with options set to highest quality, shows significant banding in blended areas of colour.
MEncoder is part of the mplayer package, that should pretty much take care of anything at all that you would want to do with video compression/transcoding.
your best bet would be to probably use the lavc options to produce an mpeg4 video compressed however you want (xvid, divx for instance). or to re-encode your quicktime .mov’s to something smaller…
For local viewing set it for “Animation” then simply move the slider in the encoder’s dialog back and forth along the continuum of “Quality vs. File Size” you want.
For websites, etc. use “Sorensen 3”. I assume you understand about the data rate, keyframes and other settings. No?
If what you want is cross-platform compatibility that can be played by all different media viewers then use another format. VideoLan, MPlayer and others can play many different formats with little or no trouble. M$ MediaPlayer can play several formats but, at my last recollection, it SPECIFICALLY FORBIDS the use of MP4 files unless you force it to do so by installing the 3ivx CODEC. Since most people won’t go through the trouble to do so, you are basically excluding MediaPlayer from the list if you encode to MP4.
Honestly, IMHO, you should simply encode to QuickTime and forget about all the rest. Enough people out there have QuickTime Player or another player that can read its file formats so that you don’t have to worry about them not being able to view your stuff. If that’s poses a potential problem for you, simply include the following link somewhere in your web page: GET QuickTime Player HERE.
If you have a burr under your saddle about using proprietary CODECs then do the MP4 thing. You could put a link on your page to a site where users can download the proper CODEC.
I just tried rendering in Sorensen. Boy! Did it STINK! (Sorry! My bad! )
I’ll have to check out some different settings and stuff to see if it can be improved!
In the mean time, rendering to QuickTime and using the “Animation” CODEC worked pretty well. A 1024 px. X 768 px. image (Full screen of the average computer monitor.) came out OK. 60 frames of full quality w/o sound @ 30 f.p.s. & key frames @ 15 only took up 12 MB. You wouldn’t put an image that big on the web. If you cut the size down, lowered the frame rate and moved the “Quality” slider to the left I’m sure you could get the file size down a LOT smaller. Compress your sound track correctly and I’m sure it wouldn’t add much to the file size at all. (You can really compress the bejeezes out of sound if you know how.)
If I can find some good settings I’ll report back.
I quite like MPEG-1 with its compatibility. Before H264, I never really liked any of the Mpeg-4 codecs because they seem to cause a lot of blockiness.
I always render to an image sequence because it’s easy to replace broken frames. I then just load the image sequence into quicktime and save as an animation.
I then convert this into an mpeg using ffmpegX and the mpeg2enc encoder. The only trouble with mpeg is the file size. So if I have a long animation, I would use DivX - 3ivx probably. H264 is better but the encoder is slow and there isn’t that much support yet.
If there is sound then I would likely just use Quicktime .mov format because it’s pretty easy to add sound with that.
i’ll just re-iterate my point of using mp4 like divx or, much better, XviD. heck, whatever your heart desires i suppose. alot of people already have the Divx package installed, so theres no problem with divx/xvid for encoding.
and the sound is pretty simple.
but as Randy already pointed out, you could always just encode straight to quicktime and leave it at that. its certainly common enough these days to not even have to worry about it…
I already had mplayer but mencoder didn’t come with it - I’d never heard of it before. I downloaded it last night but haven’t tried it yet. (The command line doesn’t hold the same appeal for me as it did when I began learning MSDOS 3).
The 3ivx encoder looked very promising but is just causing problems (perhaps an incompatibility with blender). It will only render properly at 75%. I even tried loading an existing big avi into the sequencer and saving this with 3ivx at 100% but, although the images process fine frame by frame, the animation is corrupted. If I pursue it, I’ll post a question on the 3ivx forum.
I tried Quicktime-Animation at a fairly high quality setting but that file was quite big and the quality no better than Avi-jpeg set to moderate quality. In fact, even at high quality I felt the quality was poor. (See below for disclaimer**) A 375x300 animation set to Medium quality rendered at 6.9MB and the quality was less than poor (blue sky was seriously banded and main objects showed significant artifacts.) I’m a blender-newby but I couldn’t let something like this go public.
For now, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll stick with the Quicktime-sorenson3 option if people think that has wide enough acceptance. The quality is a bit poor but considering the filesize, it’s a fair trade-off for postable files.
I assume you understand about the data rate, keyframes and other settings. No?
**To be honest - no - and no doubt that plays its part in my frustration. But I’m getting there. Any advice, settings or links welcome
At this stage I just wanted opinion on useful formats to play with so I didn’t waste time perfecting and posting a format no one else could/would use.
I’ve just rediscovered a copy HyperEngine AV sitting deep within my apps folder. It’s not the most intuitive program I’ve ever used but it does offer a range of conversion options - and it was free. It even saved using the 3ivx codec with no problem.
I remember I downloaded it originally to enable me to combine audio with video but haven’t needed it since. But now at least I can render at hi-res in QT or AVI then convert in HyperEngine.
Come to think of it, you might be right. I betcha’ I accidentally set it for Sorensen instead of Sorensen3. Must have been a brainfart.
I’ve used Sorensen 3 a few times lately with dismal results. In one example with the quality set to its highest value, the resulting animated frames were like a small, low quality jpegs had been over-enlarged. All fine details, including reflections and speculars were lost and major colour areas were blocky. It was disappointing to say the least.
Now I output to QT>Jpeg2000 then export from Hyperengine to QT>3ivx. This gives a smaller file than the Sorensen 3 did from blender with far superior quality (must try outputting Sorensen 3 with HyperEngine… hmmm?).
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