What kind of video file should I use for animating?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Recently finished a very short animation. I render it with avi codec and when I run it with Windows media player it is so slow. Still havent tried it using avi raw or avi jpeg. What should I use so it will run smooth?

2

You should first render it out as single image files, preferably lossless (like tga, exr, png,…) and then reassemble them in a second step and do the compression then so you do not have to rerender the whole thing if the first compression wasn’t that good.
You can do the compression using Blenders VSE or another program like VirtualDub (if you are on Windows and .avi is your tergat container).

As far as Codecs go try one of these:
XViD
DivX
H264

When you say you used avi codec you didn’t say which codec you used (so maybe you rendered it uncompressed which can explain it not running smoothly).

good luck in the world of compressing your stuff :slight_smile:

3

Use Quicktime Pro for your final, but like testscreenings mentions, render your final out as an image sequence and composite it together after the fact. This will save you tons of time that you might waste in trying out various codecs for your animation.

The preparing of the final video is a separate step from rendering the animation.

4

I can only echo what everyone else is saying. You will end up with a directory full of PNGS (or JPGS) that you stitch together using something else.

Also… note Atom said Quicktime Pro – that’s the one you buy, not the free Quicktime you probably already have.

Also, if you have something like After Effects, it can also open an image sequence, and then render it back out as almost any format you can imagine.

5

Or use Blender itself to encode your image sequence.

Richard

6

for serious rendering i use the png sequence method (love how png stores alpha values) but for quick previews and stuff i use mov container with h264codec. (but rise the bitrate slightly). these files are really small but look quite good. :slight_smile:

7

This show how I’m really new to the world of animating stuffs. Thanks! ^^

8

Thanks! to all of you. I’m really pretty new on rendering animations.

@testscreenings thanks a lot, i follow your instruction and did it with .tga then compress with VirtualDub.
The result is still slow. T_T
I’m really new to this so what does you mean by “reassemble them in a second steps”?

9

here is a quick explanation of the process

  1. you render out the blender file as an image sequence (png, jpeg, tga or whatever) -

then you combine them into a movie file (if you don’t use compression the file size will be massive and your computer might have trouble playing it - as in it may play back all choppy)

Step 2. - combine into a movie file
This is “reassmbling them in a second step”

you can use Blender’s VSE to do this or a number of other programs (VirtualDub, Quicktime player, Quicktime Pro etc etc)

here is how to do it with Blender
open the VSE and add an image sequence (spacebar > add images > select your images)
then click “Do Sequence” in the scene buttons and chose the output to be whatever movie format you want
if your on a PC - try AVI format with the Xvid codec

then hit animate (it won’t take as long as it did to render as the images are all ready rendered)

if it doesn’t playback you might not have the Xvid codec installed so try one of the others

does that make sense?

10

Thanks, Now I get it and it is playing smooth now. ^^.
Another thing learned thank you very much.