Unable to render an Image Sequence

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

I’m having trouble using the VSE to render an image sequence into a quicktime h.264 movie. So far my attempts have resulted in a movie which jitters backwards and forwards through the frames (a stuttering effect) or blender unexpectedly quits before it finishes the render.

To start with I rendered a simple walkcycle of a character into a .png image sequence. The sequence is 409 frames long at 24fps and the size is 1080x382. That worked fine.

I then open a new project and add the .png image sequence to VSE, choose the quicktime format and the h.264 codec and make sure ‘do sequence’ is selected in the animation panel and that i’m outputting the file where i want it to go. I’m not totally sure what settings I should be using for the h.264 codec. I’ve tried 24 and 25 frames per second, keyframe every 24 and 25 frames and also with the ‘limit data rate to 90 KBytes/sec’ checked and unchecked on different attempts.

I’m using a Power Mac G5, Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC Processor with 2 GB DDR SDRAM

and running blender 2.46

If anyone has any clue as to what might solve my problem please let me know what you think it might be

Thank you

2

Render out into MJPEG-B then use quicktime pro itself to export the motion jpeg version as H264.

3

Thanks for the info Atom. I guess I’ll have to purchase quicktime pro.

I spent more time searching through previous posts to do with rendering to h.264 and it seems like it just doesn’t want to work for anyone. Some people seem to suggest that it might be because quicktime h.264 has been encrypted to only work from quicktime pro 7 itself, but if you check this FAQ page at apple:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html

and read the paragraph under the heading

‘Will application developers be able to access H.264 via QuickTime APIs?’

doesn’t it suggest that other applications should be able to make use of the codec, unless I completely misunderstood what it was saying. Which leaves me thinking that maybe it’s an issue with blender.

I am very much out of my depth here so please excuse me if this all seems naive.