Video Editing Software?

[Kevin Thorp]

How do you all edit your final animations?

I know some teams do everything within 3ds Max, but that doesn't seem practical if you have multiple scenes and multiple audio tracks.

We have used Pinnacle Studio in the past and have been happy with it's capabilities, but it doesn't do QuickTime.

So what video editing software do you recommend? What are it's pros & cons? Is it affordable?

Thanks!

[dhitchco]

Kevin,
you're merging the worlds of "animation" software witht he worlds of "video editing" software"...that's OK. I'd suggest the following work process:

1) Create your animation in 3D Max (or whatever animation package can "export" as a movie)

2) Take that output (e.g. as a 15 frame per second Quicktime file) and run it through VirtualDub (a freeware converter program); convert from 15fps Quicktime to 29.97 (NTSC) frame-per-second AVI file

3) Now, edit the file, add music, etc in any video editor such as Pinnacle Studio 10 or MS-MovieMaker2, etc.

4) Almost all of the video editing packages can then export your animation back into Quicktime, WMV, MPEG or other file formats. If the software can't convert back into Quicktime, then re-use the "VirtualDub" software to do the conversion.

Hint: MS-MovieMaker is free from Microsoft, whereas video software such as Pinnacle Studio (less than $70) is fine. Using Adobe Premiere is rediculously too complex and expensive....

Originally Posted by Kevin342

How do you all edit your final animations? I know some teams do everything within 3ds Max, but that doesn't seem practical if you have multiple scenes and multiple audio tracks.

We have used Pinnacle Studio in the past and have been happy with it's capabilities, but it doesn't do QuickTime.

So what video editing software do you recommend? What are it's pros & cons? Is it affordable?

Thanks!

[Kevin Thorp]

Why create the original animation in 3ds Max at 15 fps? Why not start with 29.97 to get smoother motion?

Does VirtualDub cause any loss of quality?

We'll post our animation on our website in .WMV or MPEG4 format to reduce the files size (6 - 10 meg) but the AVA rules require all entries to be in QuickTime format and =<250 meg in size.

[jdiwnab]

If you need quicktime formats, then Windows Movie Maker isn't a good idea. I made a DVD once through Movie Maker, then had to convert it to AVI. The quality was down greatly. I use ULead Video Studio because it came with my DVD burner and get good AVI's out of it. If you have access to it, you might also consider iMovie for editing becuase it exports to a varity of formats and I find is fairly good.

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally Posted by Kevin342

Why create the original animation in 3ds Max at 15 fps? Why not start with 29.97 to get smoother motion?

Does VirtualDub cause any loss of quality?

We'll post our animation on our website in .WMV or MPEG4 format to reduce the files size (6 - 10 meg) but the AVA rules require all entries to be in QuickTime format and =<250 meg in size.

Kevin there are several posts about this subject, and you can search for them.

But to answer your questions

Yes Any conversion from a lossless codec like WMV to MPEG-4 will cause a loss in quality. Your best bet is to export all of your animation into a DV file, and use that to import into your favorite movie editor (excluding Windows Movie Maker). When you export it, export it at 30fps. I don't see why the previous guy recommended 15fps. Once you finished it in the movie editor then you can export into whatever you want (MOV, WMV, Real, whatever)

[dlavery]

To get the best quality possible for the animation, save all of your original source images in as high quality a format as possible. It is easy to down-sample from there to fit the final format requirements, but you can't go the other way and add quality in if the source material is crap. For example, when you are creating the final output from 3ds Max, save all the frames in a raw uncompressed format (e.g. TIFF). Don't use any compression on these images (e.g. don't save as JPEG). Figure out whatever the maximum frame rate is that you will ever need, and render the frames based on that rate. If you are going to submit your animation as a 15fps QuickTime, and you will never use it anywhere else, then fine - go ahead and render it out at 15fps. But if it will be submitted as a 30fps (or 29.97fps) video to maximize the quality, then render it that way. Also (and this is the part that some teams overlook), if you are ever going to use your animation anywhere else - like having it shown on the local news broadcast when you win the Visualization award at the Championships (!) - then you will want to have a broadcast-quality version ready. This is easy if you already have the frames fully rendered as a high-quality set of images at full frame rate.

Assemble the raw images into QuickTime clips using any of several utilities (e.g. VirtualDub on the PC, or GraphicConverter on the Mac). As you assemble the clips, apply the same rule - save all your working files in as high-quality format as possible. If you can, save the resulting animation clips with no compression (i.e. when selecting the codec, choose "none"). If the tool you use does not allow this, then use a codec that will allow you to dial in the level of compression. For example, use MPEG-4 with the quality set to "highest" and the maximum data rate set to something absurdly high (like 1,000MB/sec). The resulting files will be huge, but worth it.

Now it is time to assemble the clips into the final animation. If you have access to one, at this point you might consider moving the images and clips over and doing the rest of the process on a Mac (please, no Mac-vs-PC flames - I just find the tools available on a Mac for image and video manipulation easier to use and more comprehensive than their PC counterparts, and given that the required submission format is a QuickTime movie, it seems to make sense to build the movie on the native QuickTime platform to maximize the compatibility during editing). My preferred tool of choice is iMovie on a Mac. Pinnacle Studio or AVID or Adobe Premiere will do approximately the same thing on the PC side. Final Cut Pro (or Premiere for the PC) is probably an overkill solution. They will work and allow you to have a massive level of control over just about everything. But if this is the only video project you are doing, the effort to get up the learning curve with those packages probably isn't worth it (and they are expensive). iMovie is free (it is preloaded on most Macs) and the editing tools are comprehensive enough that I keep defaulting back to it for a lot of the stuff that I do, even though I have and use Final Cut Pro quite a bit.

Whichever tool you use, as you assemble the clips into your final animation the same rule of thumb will apply - save all your working versions in as high-quality and complete a format as possible. If your end submission is going to be 15fps DVCPRO-NTSC with a single mono audio channel, you still want to save all your working versions as 30fps uncompressed video with full dual-channel uncompressed stereo tracks (Linear PCM, 44.1 KHz rate, 24- or 32-bit sample size, full L-R stereo). Only when you are ready to made your final, final, final version that you will actually submit to Autodesk do you even want to consider creating a compressed version. This will ensure that your image quality is maximized, the video artifacts are kept to a minimum, and your flexibility to create other high-quality versions for other uses is maintained.

-dave

[Kevin Thorp]

Thank you for the very informative posting, Dave.

Do you have a link to one of your sample animations - to demonstrate the quality of the video format? For instance, how about the simulation for the 2006 game? We're all animators here. We promise we wont share it with the engineers & designers on our teams before Saturday.

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by Kevin342

Thank you for the very informative posting, Dave.

Do you have a link to one of your sample animations - to demonstrate the quality of the video format? For instance, how about the simulation for the 2006 game? We're all animators here. We promise we wont share it with the engineers & designers on our teams before Saturday.

Sure, no problem. I will get right on that and send it to you all. But I seem to have misplaced the file, and it may take me a little while to find it and provide the link. It will probably take me, oh let's see, about 2-1/2 days to find it again. Is that OK?

-dave

[BruceJ]

Also keep in mind when you render your images in 3ds max whether you are going to do any compositing with those images.

Compositing is like how they do "blue/green screening" to combine live actors and CG backgrounds in movies.
It requires having alpha channels in the images so other images can be seen through the alpha channel when the images are layered on top of each other, like in Adobe Photoshop.

If you plan to do any compositing, then the rendered images should be a format that supports alpha channels such as TIFF or TARGA. As far as I know, JPG doesn't support alpha channels.

These formats are a larger file size, but once it's all loaded into a program such as Adobe Premiere, then the editing program will compress it when it is converted to the Quicktime movie. I suggest the output from the editing program be the only and last time a compression such as Quicktime is used.
In other words, use raw TIFF/TARGAs for images and WAV for music/sounds until the entire movie is just the way you like it, then convert it all to Quicktime.

-Bruce
Animation mentor, team 111

[Kevin Thorp]

So you recommend sequentially numbered TIFF or TGA files (i.e. animation0001.tga, animation0002.tga, animation0003.tga) as the raw output from Max, instead of a single uncompressed AVI? That's a lot of images - 900 for a 30-second animation!

We can't afford Adobe Premiere but I imagine other video editing programs are smart enough to automatically chain together sequential images.

[Nuttyman54]

Max can do that itself. In Video Post (in the Render menu) you can specify and input. click the first image file, and hit the sequence checkbox. It should recognize how many files are in the sequence, but you can correct it if necessary. Add an output event, make it a video file and run! My team always uses this method to export our files

[sketner]

I'd like to suggest Videomach, which has worked well for us for assembling the frames, and which is free to schools. It's very low-order but gets the job done.

[videofan]

Originally Posted by Kevin342

So what video editing software do you recommend?

presentavid

[Mazin]

Originally Posted by dlavery

For example, when you are creating the final output from 3ds Max, save all the frames in a raw uncompressed format (e.g. TIFF). Don't use any compression on these images (e.g. don't save as JPEG).

Originally Posted by BruceJ

If you plan to do any compositing, then the rendered images should be a format that supports alpha channels such as TIFF or TARGA. As far as I know, JPG doesn't support alpha channels.

These formats are a larger file size, but once it's all loaded into a program such as Adobe Premiere, then the editing program will compress it when it is converted to the Quicktime movie. I suggest the output from the editing program be the only and last time a compression such as Quicktime is used.
In other words, use raw TIFF/TARGAs for images and WAV for music/sounds until the entire movie is just the way you like it, then convert it all to Quicktime...

Outdated.
TIFF/TGAs offer no beneficial advantages over more superior formats, but instead merely take more hard disk space. The notion that compression reduces quality is largely relegated to the lossy JPEG format. For example, TGA and TIFF both use compression (optionally). I recommend PNG. See my test with a generic rendered still from Max:

• TIFF/TGA uncompressed - 1229148 bytes (1.2 MB) ¹
• TGA with simple RLE compression - 1014744 bytes (991 KB) ²
• TIFF with (proprietary, i might add) LZW compression - 513076 bytes (501.1 KB) ²
• PNG output from Max - 408870 bytes (399.3 KB)
• PNG compressed more efficiently (pngcrush) - 391914 bytes (382.7 KB) ³

¹ I don't know whether Konqueror measures in Mibibytes or Megabytes (i think megabytes), but the filesize in bytes is provided.
²I don't know whether Max can output compressed TGA (RLE) or TIFF (LZW). It should be able to.
³ I don't actually expect you to do this. It appears that Max's PNG exporter is competent.

Further details: Original is 24-bit PNG with 8-bit alpha channel. pngcrush was passed no arguments when run. The GIMP was used for converting. There was absolutely no quality or information loss among the formats tested. LZW is only the most common TIFF compression; there are others, including JPEG compression (lossy). TGA only has simple RLE. LZW, more commonly used in GIFs, have a patent attached to them. While the infamous Unisys GIF/LZW patent has since expired, another one by IBM expires later this year. Similarily, the FLAC format is a losslessly compressed sound format, although I don't know about software support. More information on any of the above-mentioned topics can be found at Wikipedia. Somebody spotlight this post and add to my reputation.

[Morgan Gillespie]

I recommend not using Video Post, but I do recommend you learn it. When you don't have anything else video post knowledge is vital. We did ours in video post because we had no other video editing software that could save as the req type or one that could convert. Also video post hates .wmv files so you can't even use windows movie maker and import it.
Learn video post for those just in case situations but for the most part use another program.