So, this rendering business...

[TheMonarch]

Alright. I need some advice.

For the fist time ever, I am rendering my 3D work in HD [720p]. And its taking a little longer than I anticipated.

At nearly 4 hours/frame, something told me I shouldn't output as a Quicktime movie w/alpha, because if something goes wrong, I will be p*ssed.

So I thought I should output as PNG image files. But I've never done this approach before. What am I going to do with 312 PNG files? Is there an App that will sting them together for me? I've kinda done this with QT Pro before [Opening a frame, and dragging the other frames, one by one into it], but that seems unconventional.

Any ideas?

 

[ATD]

4 hours per frame, OUCH. What app are you rendering from?

As far as rendering single frames most composing apps like After Effects will read them as a sequence, just render them to their own folder.

 

[TheMonarch]

Yeah, 4 hours on my PowerBook is quite a bit. I need a quad

I'm trying to learn Maya and Cinema 4D at the same time right now. Maya for its poweress [And because I have to ] and C4D for its interface.


I'm rendering from C4D, just because what I'm trying to do isn't very complicated. But its full of shaders/effects and reflections on top of being HD.

So, if I have 312 PNGs in a folder, how do I get After effects to read it as a movie?


Thanks

 

[homerjward]

I don't know how to this in after effects, but in premiere you add all the files to the library, and import them each as the duration of one frame (ie 30fps video each frame is 1/30s)

edit: i dont know if c4d supports this (i use lightwave) but you could save as png's AND a qt movie, so if it's fine you've got the movie already but if sth messes up you've got just the png's.

 

[ATD]

Like this in AE, just select the first frame and hit open.

 

[TheMonarch]

Thank you all, you've been very helpful


As a side question. You think PNG is the best format to output as, or tiff?

 

[ATD]

Thank you all, you've been very helpful


As a side question. You think PNG is the best format to output as, or tiff?

I don't know about PNGs, I've always used tiffs, iff (Maya format) or img (Electric Image format).

 

[Erendiox]

If I were you, I'd turn all the settings down and render one version at lowest quality first, just to make sure that you can get the TIFF/PNG string to work. That way you'll know for sure. Having problems after rendering something for days would sure make me pissed.

 

[freeny]

You can streamline your rendering by turning off things like raytracing, motion blur, etc...

Its a common thing to do to do an overload on your animations when it comes to bells and wistles when you first start, I know I did. You spend all this time on process in the beginning you want the best possible product when you are done.

The average viewer wont care or see all the little subtleties that you are adding and making your renderings excessively long. Even if you are going to submit this work for a job or even a competition these things wont matter in the end unless they are crucial to your story.

Also look at your work and find other shortcuts like rendering different elements seperatly and compositing them together in AE. there is no need to animate everthing at full screen when some items can be rendered seperatly cropped and pasted together later.

 

[ATD]

4 hours is a very long time to wait for frames. I do a lot of hi res single images, sometimes over 100 MB but I'll get impatient if it takes more than 30 min. I would guess (like freeny did) that there is some setting there that's way too high.

 

[Mac Kiwi]

Do you have GI or AO turned on or something? Or are you using normal shaders or the channel shaders.. ie danel,cheen etc etc?......What about Anti alias settings also?


QT Pro - Open image sequence,select first frame.



Always render in tga or psd etc because if you render out as a .mov and you crash all your frames are gone.When you use psd etc you can re render from the frame you crashed at.



Freeny pretty much covers everything else.