United3dArtists Archive

Anyone have any recommendations for outputting video. I guess I'm as interested in your overall work-flow as I am specifics.

Right now I render my animation as numbered tiff files in their own folder. Then I use an old copy of Adobe Premier Pro to mix/edit/add audio and titles etc. After I'm happy with my presentation I export either directly to DVD, which gets OK results usually, or to an uncompressed avi which I use TMpeg to crunch to mpeg, which looks OK but not really sharp and tasty when you post to YouTube etc.

I usually render at 720x480.

Me thinks me methods are outdated and perhaps never very good to start!

Any recommendations you folks have would be greatly appreciated!

my workflow is not much different than yours, render with tga with alpha at dvd res.. 720x576 is my choice cos we use Pal-n 25fps instead of Ntsc 30fps.

After edit the movie i save the final movie in Avi without compression and very important, save your work using progressive scan, NOT interlaced mode..
With the LCD era and the blurays and dvds with progressive scan is a must save your work with the highest quality as possible. and Interlace your movie will reduce the quality at the half..

Then compress in mpg2 format with the highest quality as possible.

Thanks Prodigy. I will try to re-render my current project using TGA format for the numbered stills instead of tiff. Maybe using tiff's is part of my problem.

I did switch the video settings to progressive which gave me slightly better results.

remember:

Tga ONLY contain alpha if you use Adaptive Anti aliasing, AAx2 3 or 4 the alpha is destroyed

Also i have a very small program that convert TGA folders full of TGA with alpha in PNG with Alpha, so if your editor software doesn't work with TGA but yes with png there's a chance to do that

Why alpha is important? Well in some cases you need to set a background or you need to make layers of video for post processing.. so Alpha is a must, but other way is use ChromaKey etc.. but that is more complicated.

One important point, actually i use Workspace side only, so i'm not sure that this info have to be equal to Modelside, in this aspect MS is much better and more solid.

For the best results on YouTube, render to 1280 x 720 and 30 fps. This should result in an HD quality video. Less than this and you will get either HQ or Standard quality playback. I use a wmv codec with Sony Vegas set to VBR. After a lot of experimentation, I found that this was much better than other codec options (Quicktime, etc).

Also note that the HD playback is usually not immediately available after upload because of additional processing that they do on their end. Depending on the length of the video, it may take 1 -2 hours to complete.