3D Studio Max - Exporting to AVI

MitchSaad

Hey guys,

I'm rendering an animation I've made, It's being rendered with mental ray and is 500 frames (20sec) long.

I've selected a save location, set an export format (AVI), told it to render all 500 frames and left it over night. After 15 hrs of rendering which, according to the render progress dialog box, included all 500 frames - the file was only .99GB and 11sec long.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

Thanks,

Mitchsaad

spacefrog

Depends on the Max version you are using there's a bug in the AVI output module, which produces broken AVI files when the file size exceeds 1GB. The AVI file simply gets truncated and does'nt grow any more after that limit.
I think the bug is there since Max 2010 ( i can't remember when i reported it first) but my memory might fail on me and it might be since Max 2011 or 2012. I'm even not sure that it's fixed for 2013. So report it using the bug report form, otherwise there is no chance this might get fixed...

As a general rule:
NEVER EVER render directly to AVI ( okay maybe for quick previews), render to image sequence and use some tools to produce an AVI's out of it. Advantages of an image sequence:
When your machine crashes, the AVI is completly lost, while the image sequence is still there until the point it crashed. No quality loss when you use png or similar, while keeping the file size moderate. You can generate AVI's with playback rate as you like etc...

MikeF

hmmm, a lot of possibilities here:
-what's your resolution
-quality settings
-render engine

In any case though, (i know its not much help now, but for future ref.) it's always best to render out an image sequence and assemble in a compositing program. In the few times i remember actually rendering a video sequence out of max there were lots of issues.

MitchSaad

Huh, ok that's good to know LOL - Thanks for the help Spacefrog - i can't see the option anywhere, where do i find it?

spacefrog

MitchSaad wrote: »

Huh, ok that's good to know LOL - Thanks for the help Spacefrog - i can't see the option anywhere, where do i find it?

you simply set the output filename to use png, jpg extension or whatever image format you like to use. Be aware that jpg is lossy though...

MitchSaad

spacefrog wrote: »

you simply set the output filename to use png, jpg extension or whatever image format you like to use. Be aware that jpg is lossy though...

Awesome! thanks mate

SirCalalot

When rendering out image sequences in UDK, I like to use a free program called VirtualDub to compile them to .avi

Just make sure that you change the framerate to whatever you rendered out to, as the program defaults to 10fps with image sequences.