Quality concerns rendering tga frames to video
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Hey guys, I'm making an avi on the generator, made a basic scene and rendered out an animation but getting really poor results with 3ds max and Premiere Pro. The best I could get was with quicktime using the animation setting at full quality, not perfect but watchable but even then the res had to be turned down otherwise major pixellation occoured.
Here's a video uploaded to Photobucket, the quality isn't far off what I have here locally... (ps: you have to click the image and view on photobucket to see full quality)
Here a still frame for comparison...
So it's like this, the still frames look good but once they are sequenced there are lots of artifacts occouring. Have tried every codec in Premiere Pro CS4 and 3ds Max9 x64, of which the latter app only has 3 available anyway.
Been thinking maybe I should install 3ds max x32 for the extra codecs that are available but otoh maybe it's to do with one thing I haven't tried yet...
...in Premiere Pro there's an option when you start a new project to have progressive scan, lower field first or higher field first, tried lower field first but not the other two, is there any difference here or could someone enlighten me as to which application I should be using to render a sequence of uncompressed tga's to crystal clear video?
Here's a video uploaded to Photobucket, the quality isn't far off what I have here locally... (ps: you have to click the image and view on photobucket to see full quality)
Here a still frame for comparison...
So it's like this, the still frames look good but once they are sequenced there are lots of artifacts occouring. Have tried every codec in Premiere Pro CS4 and 3ds Max9 x64, of which the latter app only has 3 available anyway.
Been thinking maybe I should install 3ds max x32 for the extra codecs that are available but otoh maybe it's to do with one thing I haven't tried yet...
...in Premiere Pro there's an option when you start a new project to have progressive scan, lower field first or higher field first, tried lower field first but not the other two, is there any difference here or could someone enlighten me as to which application I should be using to render a sequence of uncompressed tga's to crystal clear video?
Replies
You will probably have to download a codec pack (although then you should be able to use it in Premiere I guess?) but Virtualdub is free so that's what I use.
Maybe I should just pussy out and install 3ds max x32 and do all the rendering there inc. sound? It may be less hassle but lol I can't remember the last time I used 32 bit max so still pretty unsure what would be productive.
Also, off topic but I recommend you smooth out the curves for the camera movements, looks really fake with the linear movements now.
Also, an animation encoded as a Quicktime MOV with the Animation setting (and quality at 100) should look basically identical to your full-res rendered frames -- albeit at a very large file size -- so I'm not sure how you're seeing a drop in quality. Unfortunately I don't use Premiere so I can't help with specific settings, but here's my workflow:
I use After Effects to composite image sequences from Maya and export full-quality uncompressed video files with the Animation setting. Then I throw that huge video file into Quicktime Pro ($30, money well spent) for compression into small, high-quality H264 .mov files. The advantages to QT are cross-platform compatibility and wide market share (as well as not forcing site visitors to download codecs), and QT Pro has two-pass H264 encoding. The disadvantage is Apple's poor support for 64-bit QT on Windows, as well as gamma issues that have been around for years.
Also, the camera movements in your video are awkward and distracting from the model. I recommend a simpler, smoother motion with a lot more easing on those keyframes.
pyromania, thanks for the tip, only used vdub once so I didn't know you could do that, awesome!
Ark, yes tried h.264, it was available as a standalone encoder or as a function of quicktime, both results were really poor yet I have heard nothing but good things about it.
MoP, I was wrong, just tried it again and it's a little better uncompressed from max but with premiere pro it's alot worse.
jipe, thanks for the advice, maybe it's this lower field interlaced setting that is causing the disturbances in encoding?
Should I be using After Effects instead of Premiere Pro?
Thanks for the replies, will change the camera motion, actually set it to linear because I thought it was cooler but...wrong! Will try out a few things now, virtual dub sounds enticing and if people are saying quicktime is a more recognised format than avi I think I will splash out for quicktime pro. Cheers!
Sage, I tried every codec possible and all the settings, only one was halfway decent. As mentioned previously when starting the project in Premiere - lower first was selected for scan order, according to replies here it should have been progressive scan. If it's not that then there is something seriously wrong. btw I can use xvid, divx, h.264 and many others in a standalone program I use for movies and the results are sweet.
The only question now is if virtual dub can handle audio too then the sequence should be complete, although... there is an intro sequence which has already been rendered to tga's (uncompressed always) and to do is the ending showing which programs were used and contact information etc. If I can link all that together in vdub with audio it could be great.
1500 kbps is generally OK for 800x600 or so.
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4088
Sage thanks for the advice, program updated via the abobe service (there were alot of updates too) there was an encoding fix listed for adobe media encoder which seemed to fix the problem as I tested a small portion of the sequence and it looked great.
Will pimp the finished thing soon in my thread and thanks guys, as usual it has been a good learning experience