After trying about a zillion things here is a workaround to make decent .avi and .mpg files for WMP. I’m a newbie so others may have better solutions but here it is:
Output the individual frames as .jpg files
Use gromadas free/cheap VideoMach video editor, which will take a series of .jpg files in a folder and output them nicely as .avi or .mpg, the results play quite well in WMP and Quicktime both. A low resoloution on the .mpg file will make something quite comparable in size and quality to a .wmv file.
Because (at least as of Version 2.27) the .avi codec in Blender produces output that plays improperly in WMP, ATI file player and maybe some others (the Blender people tell you to use Quicktime to play the .avi’s you produce in Blender, which is ok, but the consumer watching your video may not have Quicktime). For example, in one very simple animation the movement of a couple of objects accelerated too much in WMP playback of the middle of the animation. If you don’t want to go through the whole Videomach thing, you can improve the Blender .avi’s by opening them in Quicktime and then exporting them as new .avi files. This occasionally makes artifacts (faint ghosts) in WMP with some files, but is a definite improvement.
By the way, does anyone know why Blender’s .avi’s play funny in WMP? Is it a DirectX vs OpenGL kind of thing?
feed targa sequence back into the blender sequence editor to output a raw avi
convert to MPEG1 using TMGEnc
What’s up with the tga intermediate step? Well,
if I need to fix a small bit of the animation, if I
rendered to avi I would have to re-render the
whole thing. With rendering to tga I can re-render
just the frames that need fixing, then I can use
the sequence editor to quickly turn it into an avi
again. TMPGEnc gives really good quality output
and also lets you multiplex sound into your animation.
Zweistein Video Editor ( freeware ) seems to accept most formats, and chunks them out in your choice of codec. Though I must say, that aside from it crashing when I switch between certain codecs, I have never had any problems with Blender output. Zweistein is also a good way to merge your audio track ( that you made with blenders new audio sync feature ) with your video. Also there is another program I use to string together JPEGS into videos, also freeware called ‘JPEG to Video’ (very original) and another one that does BMPs that came with WinMorph, another piece of freeware. ( I don’t believe I own more than one or two programs that aren’t ) Anyway, one good way to crunch videos is to convert them from raw avi, to mpeg, to avi codec. This has worked for me though I could not tell you how or why.
