Video editing help!

[Biff]

Originally Posted by animatorkid

Huh?

Could you put that in plain english?
I'm new to compression formats.

OK DVC is both a tape format and a compression format. The first part describes how you record digitally on a DV tape, The second part is how you turn full bandwidth video in a compressed form that you can record on tape or on a computer. The whole story of compression takes many paragraphs to explain including parts of the history of television. Full bandwidth digital television (SDI) is 270mbits/second, DV or DVCPRO compression is 25mbits/second. SDI is also :422 which describes how much color information is skipped as you scan (history of TV) a line DV is :411 which skips more color information (thus helping to leave some data behind) Codex are short names for encode and decode methods that transform TV pictures from on (mostly uncompressed) form to another compressed form, that can be uncompressed and displayed on Computers or on TV monitors. Sorry to ramble so there really is not real short English answer. The other issue is DV/DVCPRO is normally a 720 x 486 frame and if your animation is 640 x 480 you get really bad scaling issues. I can ask some of the animators I've worked with in the past if there is a fast and good method to get a good looking DV/DVCPRO animation.

[jfelser]

@ Tom Higgins - Try reinstalling Quicktime 7 (or installing it new) and rerendering (from Adobe) with the highest possible quality settings, using DV-NTSC.

[BruceJ]

Originally Posted by Tom Higgins

I'm having the same problem and have lost many hours trying all kinds of combinations of settings in exporting the final post production. I've used Adobe Premier for the last two years but exported in quicktime default which is Motion JPEG A compression also in 640 x 480 format. I've exproted in nearly all other codecs and they all seem fine except for the DV/DVCPRO NTSC required by AutoDesk. It's also a large file, ours is 200 MB whereas the "movie" compression gives a great, crisp, and smooth animation. Does anyone know who we might contact at FIRST or AutoDesk to get help on this problem? I've used the Max video post and its difficult to work with and really don't want to start editing again...We're done except for the final render.

Thanks

I have installed QuickTime 7 as suggested, however I still get the same problem using Adobe Premiere 6.0.

Using 3ds Max 8, there is no problem using the DV-NTSC compression.

The alternative I'm going to use is to bring all of the audio and video into Premiere to line everything up, then ouput as a single movie using some method that still looks good (maybe some other compression).

Video post in 3ds max is simple enough just to create an Image input event set to the length of the entire animation and an Image output event set to the DV-NTSC compression for the final Quicktime movie that will be submitted.

Hopefully my plan works.

[jfelser]

I tried that strategy, with very poor results, but I'd be curious to see if it works for you, since QT7 did not.

[Tom Higgins]

I'm just wondering....AutoDesk requires 720 X 480 yet Max renders in 720 x 486. We changed the 486 to 480 before we rendered. Is this issue a typo of does it affect any of this? Is there more than one 720 x format? I'll try the QT7 in a minute or so.

[Tom Higgins]

QT7 does not help.

[vadyr]

Originally Posted by Tom Higgins

I'm just wondering....AutoDesk requires 720 X 480 yet Max renders in 720 x 486. We changed the 486 to 480 before we rendered. Is this issue a typo of does it affect any of this? Is there more than one 720 x format? I'll try the QT7 in a minute or so.

we just change 486 to 480 when it renders. each still frame looks a little funny, but when we throw it together in adobe premier it all looks nice

[3DMentorTeam388]

Hello Everybody,

Just to throw some quick help everybodys way. Check out the following site,

www.dv.com

They have some very helpful articales on compression and codec's, plus just about everything else related to Digital Video. Also check out their forum section. You will find alot of helpful people, and sections devoted to 3D effects and authoring.

Lee

[BruceJ]

My method has seemed to work ok - using max video post for the final quicktime output.

Also, I found out that by rendering different scenes as targa file sequences and bringing these into video post, the video post conversion to quicktime only takes about 5 minutes.

So if anything needs to change, just render the new frames needed and run through the video post again.

I also found that a free image viewer utility called Irfanview can rename files as a batch process. Very helpful when I'm replacing frames in the middle of the sequence.

When rendering a scene in Max as a file sequence, it seems to name each file with the frame number. That's fine if your whole animation is one scene, but does anyone know how to give it a starting frame such as Anim0078.tga and have it continue rendering more frames as Anim0079.tga, Anim0080.tga, etc?

If so, it would save the step of using Irfanview to rename the files.

[MattK]

Okay first of all, go to Adobe.com and download the free trial of Adobe Priemere Pro. Import your video into Adobe and then render it out at full quality. When you play your video back on your computer it will prob look crappy- but if you burn it to a DVD it will look fine on a normal TV. From my understanding its a mis-match of the resolution of the video and the res of your monitor.

[jfelser]

There is also a setting, in Quicktime, called 'Enable High Quality Video' which supposedly can make a significant difference in the quality of some videos, although it did not look terribly different for my team's.

[Tom Higgins]

I got a little help from autodesk support and a discreet discussion forum. I haven't tried any of this yet but it may help. These were two seperate comments I got and left the names off since they would not know I would end up quoting them here. If this works for anyone let us know. I'll be working on it Saturday.



"Render an image sequence out of max (png or tga) instead of quicktime so there’s no compression issues from max to premier
Bring image sequence into Premier
Render Quicktime out of Premier using the correct codec."



"dv is 720x480, 29.97 fps and lower field dominant... period.

i'd suggest rendering image sequences from max at 720x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9 for 4x3 "regular" tv. [1.2 for 16x9 widescreen full frame]. frames or fields, your call there. since max cant work at 29.97, you'll be going thru a slight frame rate conversion anyway. let premiere do this.

i'd recommend never, and i mean ever rendering to a compressed format from max. let premiere do this on the final output."

[Tom Higgins]

This should probably be another thread....but now I can't get max to render with sound. I am using video post got my video sequenced and rendered nicley then I "added exteral event" for each of the sound tracks...imported them (they show up as windows icons with the names I gave them) ....and they are wave files. I added an external event and rendered but the rendering stops as soon as the wav file starts in the sequence. There is so little option in video post that it is quite annoying. I've used Premier in the past and this was no problem but now with the new compression requirements, I've been getting really blurry outputs but they had sound.
To avoid having to do all the post production stuff from scratch I used the completely edited scenes from premier and exported them to video post as a series of targa files. I then rendered them in max in the required format and they came out nice. But now sound is the issue. I guess I just can remember how to add sound tracks in video post and get them to render with the video. Today's pretty much it for us...if anyone can help? Really desperate

[BruceJ]

What I did was export the entire soundtrack from Premiere as one .wav file.

In 3ds max, use the track view and look for sound. Right-click the "sound" to open up the properties dialog. Set it to be your soundtrack .wav file.

In video post, simply do the video part (your targa sequence) as the input image event, and use the Quicktime as the output event.

Execute/run the video post and the sound should be picked up from the track view you set.

Just make sure the soundtrack from Premiere (export timeline - audio only) is in sync with the beginning of your targa sequence.

[Tom Higgins]

I'm confused. First, as I understand, yu want me to export the video track as a .wav file and then later you mention that you need to export the sound track as a .mov file audio only??