i followed the guide from the introduction to charachted animation thingy, i added audio for an animation, synced it up and renderd an animation, but when i go to play it back in real player, there is no sound!
anyone know why this could be? my only solution i guess is to add the audio seperately in imovie or something, but i would like to know how to not have to do that every time i want to make a cgi animation.
The problem with FFMPEg is that all the codecs are lossy. And I am going to go on here. Lossy is unacceptable. Especially if I am doing a final render. Say I render a 100 frames and each frame takes 10 hours. Then on the last frame the power goes out. using FFMPEG, I lose everything because all my frames are in a single file.
And a lot of those codecs are slow as well, so it increases render time just to use that format.
EXAMPLE:
I just loaded up the default cube and set my animation length to 360. I added a long enough wave file. I enabled the audio and I can hear it play in Blender. I choose FFMPEG and enabled multiplex audio to AC3 @128bit rate. I chose Quicktime H264 (NOTE: I have quicktime pro installed). I set the format to FFMPEG and clicked the RGB button. I rendered the file and it produced a black quicktime with no audio. Quicktime complained it needed more software, which means the FFMPEG quicktime is not a “real” quicktime. This implementation is not usable.
Other 3D systems do not make excuses about adding audio to a stream it is simple, if you want audio with your aniamtion, you just include it. With Blender, I have done tons of test renders and nothing works.
Blender always makes corrupt quicktime movies whether I choose FFMPEG or Quicktime itself.
It is a shame that this feature does not work because quicktime is the heart and soul of many production houses. I can’t hand off an excuse to someone, in my business.
Atom: If you are rendering a sequence that takes 10 hours a frame, I STRONGLY advise you to render a file sequence, for so many reasons, including the power failure scenario.
You then combine the sequence with the soundtrack in an editing program (which could be Blender’s VSE). This approach is the best to use for any 3d program. You should never do the major render to a single file.
As far as ffmpeg and lossy formats go, HuffYUV is a lossless codec, and on the audio side I believe AAC is also lossless.
Yep, that is a kind of extreme example I mentioned and because I have no other output options, I always render to an image sequence. One thing I should mention is that Blender does synch well with audio. I will import my voice over track into Blender, animate to it, render out my image sequence and then import that sequence into After Effects. Then I import the same wave file I animated to and it all lines up. So I do have a work flow, but having quicktime with audio output from Blender would be ideal.
Also, I just did a test, as you suggested. I animated the default cube spinning for 250 frame. I imported my audio into the VSE. I enabled the sound icon. I playback in Blender and I hear the audio. I choose FFMPEG. I select AVI. I select HUFF. I enable multiplexing and choose ACC. I render out my AVI and I get an AVI that says error missing codec (yes I have Huff installed). The AVI starts playing and I have not audio.
I feel like I am beating a dead horse here. But then I see threads like this and it makes me thing, wow, other people experience the same bug. This could very well be a Windows XP only bug. I always mention that. This also makes me think, that the developers of Blender do not actually use Blender in a day-to-day fashion, like we do. I even see files in the official “regression” suite that fail to work on new versions.
I will still state it so all the search engine know. Blender does not produce audio output on Windows XP SP3. This has been broken for years and no one seems to care.
Thanks for the confirmation, Atom. I’m running Blender 2.48 and Python 2.5.2 on Win XP Pro SP3. I’ve been trying to get audio–any audio–into a an animation. No dice.
After reading what you and others have said about Blender’s lack of audio handling capability, I’ll cut my losses and just combine the animation with the audio tracks in an external app (Vegas) to create the final avi. Point being, thank you for saving me from wasting a bunch of time of trying to achieve the impossible.
I found this thread last night whilst trying to solve the same problem. I’ve since sorted it both on XP and Vista. I know little about Codecs and Containers, but FWIW these are my settings:
Format Panel: FFMpeg Video Tab: Format = MPEG-4 Audio Tab: Format = MP3. (Multiplex Audio is also set here.)
I’ve also had success with the following:
Format Panel: FFMpeg Video Tab: Format = AVI and Codec = H264 Audio Tab: Format = MP3. (Multiplex Audio is also set here.)
Both of these play happily in VLC but even though my systems think that the MPEG-4 version is meant to be played in the Quicktime player, it can’t play it. Same things with the AVI version, neither Winamp or windows media player want to know.
I found that several of the above settings work, but I didn’t know it because they won’t play back audio with the Blender play button. Nor will they play in my Windows media player. ONLY the VLC player works to play back audio on my system. Wish I had used that from the beginning, would have saved several test renders. Thanks for this thread.
This may not be precisely on-topic, since so far this is talking about Windows and I’m running Linux, but is it safe to assume that I have to install ffmpeg to my box before it’ll show up as an option in Blender? I’m not seeing it.
Portia,
The same thing happens with mine, I get no audio in Blender playback, only when I load it into VLC player. To be honest, It had never occurred to me to test that until you wrote because I had always been concerned with whether my output was going to be playable (with sound) elsewhere.
Klaatuteela,
I also run Blender 2.48a on Slackware 12.2 once in a while. The FFMpeg options were there from the start and I most definitely did not install it as a separate package. I assumed that it shipped with Blender. These are the settings I used.
I can confirm that the second configuration (FFMPEG, AVI/H264, MP3) also fixed my problem (which was: sound played fine in Blender, but no sound in output file, under Windows XP SP3).
Hi, I realise that the original poster might have solved his problem by now - I had the same problem in Windows XP Pro SP3. My workaround is to use VitualDub - did the avi in just 5 minutes from download - free software but only for windows!? (other formats are ffdshow, Indeo, MS H261/263, MS video, Xvid Mpeg-4 )- when you select it you immediately are shown if the drivers and dll’s are present to use. Gotta luv that!
