Looking For High Res Animation Advice

[David Bethel]

Greetings,

I'm looking for advice / suggestions / referrals for video editing software to make high quality animations.

I don't mind paying for software, just don't want to break the bank on 1 app that's not all that great.

My scenario:

1,024 x 768 rendered images ( jpg or tga )
1,000 to 3,000 frames per animation
30 fps ( each frame advances the camera 0.5" - so about walking speed )
Final file size is not an issue ( 4GB is ok )
Final file type is not an issue as long as there is a player readily available and the quality is there
No Audio required

The end result is an animation to run on a fast laptop displayed to either a large flat screen or high end video projector.

I currently use Bink from RadGameTools and it makes an exe file

I've tried:

AVS Video Editor
VideoPad
MovieMaker
PaintShop Pro Animation

All leave at lot to be desired when it comes to smooth frame transitions.

Thanks in advance. -David

[jagabo]

Are you talking about taking already rendered images and making a video out of them? VirtualDub is free and supports JPG and TGA import (sequentially numbered files). You can set the frame rate to anything you want and use any audio and video codec. It only makes AVI files but you can always convert to other containers (MKV, MP4, TS, etc) with other software. It's not a full fledged editor though.

[David Bethel]

jagabo,

Yes, the images are already made.

VirtualDub looks really fast. But I don't see any option to smooth out the transition from frame to frame.

And the play back frame rate doesn't seem to stick. With the rate forced to 30FPS, it takes 12 seconds to play back 90 frames which should be 3 seconds of animation.

I'm probably missing something. though. Thanks! -David

[poisondeathray]

If these are CGI type animations, sometimes adding motion blur helps with (lowish) framerates to give the perception of smoothness

vdub isn't meant for playback, and realtime playback of HD images is often slow, sometimes limited by HDD speed. What's being suggested here is to encode to a video format, not play a series of stills.

[jagabo]

At 30 fps you shouldn't need an "smoothing" between frames. Or are you talking about making something more like a slideshow presentation with transitions?

[David Bethel]

Yes, these are CGI images.

Here's where my lack of knowledge shows.

I'm under the impression that compiling uncompressed images into an avi would be the best quality. Am I understanding that the codec put out better stuff ( movie quality )? -David

[poisondeathray]

I'm under the impression that compiling uncompressed images into an avi would be the best quality. Am I understanding that the codec put out better stuff ( movie quality )? -David

Yes uncompressed images (not lossy jpg) as input will be better

AVI is just a container, it's the type of video compression that is important

Ideally for CGI you want a format that can playback with better color sampling like 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 , but these require higher data rates and processing, and your playback device or laptop HDD might not be up to it

What are the specs of the laptop

[David Bethel]

Maybe the laptop is not high end as it was when I bought it <g>

Toshiba
1.6 GHz Celeron
2GB Ram
80 GB NTFS HD
ATI Radeon 200M 256 MB

So far a XVid MPeG-4 Compression is looking better than some of the others. -David

[poisondeathray]

Yes, it's probably too old to play better quality formats. xvid has 4:2:0 sampling so your color edges will look more blocky compared to the original CGI render

I was going to suggest UT Video Codec in RGB444 mode , which is lossless and would give you accurate color sampling, but I don't think you will be able to play it. It's very fast for multithreaded decoding, but you only have 1 slow core

[David Bethel]

I just tried th UT codec on my workstation and it wasn't fast enough < wow! >

If avi is just a holder, are any of the other formats better ( not reliant on a local codec )

Because bink outputs a exe file, it is totally self sufficent.

Thanks! -David

[poisondeathray]

I just tried th UT codec on my workstation and it wasn't fast enough < wow! >

If avi is just a holder, are any of the other formats better ( not reliant on a local codec )

Because bink outputs a exe file, it is totally self sufficent.

UT should be fast enough on a capable system; you have to set up for decoding and threading in the options. You can get back realtime 720p60 on an i7, it's about 1.5x faster than huffyuv (another lossless codec known for it's decoding speed). You might be limited by storage transfer speed (HDD)

I'm not to familar with bink

Yes avi is just a "holder" , what do you mean by "better"? You need a local codec (codec is software for compression and decompression) , or use uncompressed - but your laptop HDD won't be able to handle the transfer speeds for uncompressed

Your options are limited for quality if your laptop is your playback device - you are limited by CPU, and by HDD transfer speeds

You might be able to decode a high bitrate MPEG2 4:2:2 all I-frame format

[David Bethel]

Bink is focused more on gamers.

This stuff has more acronyms than enough.

It looks like that both VirtualDubs AND the codec options must be set to 30 fps before you can be sure wit will play back at that rate. Huffuv doesn't seem to have that option.

I guess that my question about better is 'Am I better off converting to MPEG rather than avi?'

Thanks again! -David

[poisondeathray]

I guess that my question about better is 'Am I better off converting to MPEG rather than avi?'

Impossible to answer. It depends on what kind of AVI (remember it's just a container - think of it as a box that holds video & audio), depends on the settings used , etc...

And "better" for what? better for quality? better in terms of you can play it back on your laptop? ...

You're going to have to do some tests; again you are limited by your laptop

In theory 4:2:2 will have better color than 4:2:0 , and most MPEG2 software supports 422High for playback. But that extra color information requires more bitrate to encode, more cpu to decode, faster harddive to transfer...thus you're in a vicious circle

[jagabo]

PicVideo's MJPEG codec supports 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 YUV encoding.

[David Bethel]

PicVideo's MJPEG codec supports 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 YUV encoding.

Looks interesting. Is $99 for a codec expensive? I have no clue. Thanks


Yes, testing is high on the list. See what one does the best. on what setup. At least this stuff has gotten faster over the years. It took hours and hours to compile this stuff. Now a matter of minutes. That helps a lot. -David

[David Bethel]

Is there a way to make the avi ( or any format ) play back as a continuous loop? -David

[jagabo]

Is there a way to make the avi ( or any format ) play back as a continuous loop? -David

Only by setting an option in the player.

[poisondeathray]

Depending on your type of animation , you might be able to get away with using lower 4:2:0 sampling. If you have sharp edges, and contrasting colors like red beside green , or red on black, it might be more obvious

I suggested MPEG2 422 as an option, because there is a free encoder - HCEnc - that supports this , and MPEG2 has very low CPU requirements, suitable for older systems.

Here is an example of an animation, it's slightly smaller 1024x576 @ 30fps ~25Mbps, but encoded with MPEG2 422, with long GOP. Long GOP helps with compression but is more CPU intensive than I-frame only, but I have an single core old laptop that I keep around for testing purposes for "worst case" scenarios (eg. for flash on websites), and it can play MPEG2 422 easily. This can be played on most players eg. smplayer, mpchc, mpc+ffdshow to decode

Can't help you with the "transition smoothing" until you provide more information or a sample (maybe upload a zip file with some jpegs) to illustrate what you mean. It might be as simple as a playback issue of stills (.tiff) , but ok when rendered as a video

[jagabo]

Color subsampling examples:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/294144-Viewing-tests-and-sample-files?p=1792760&vie...=1#post1792760

Use a (software, "nearest neighbor" or "point" resizing) magnifier and zoom in.

[David Bethel]

Thanks,

I'll try them tomorrow when I get back into the office.

The images are 300kb each and don't compress with zipping them up. 300 frames make for a 90mb download. -David

[David Bethel]

Okay, my knowledge is beginning to expand.

Here are 100 of the smaller frames of this project. This segment has side to side panning and forward camera movement.

I've compiled the whole thing with several different codecs and do see this differences in some of these.

My laptop and the machine I use for animation both seem to like Huffuv . My main work station and CAD machine doesn't. Too bad for them.

My synopsis so far is:

• You need to match your hardware ( CPU, HD, RAM, Video Card ) to a codec that maximizes their capabilities without over taxing them on the speed the YUV color depth requires.

It will just take a time investment to find the best match. -David

[jagabo]

By converting to JPG you used YUV 4:2:0 subsampling.

Your CAD workstation probably doesn't have the HuffYUV codec installed. It doesn't come with Windows.

Color subsampling usually doesn't have too large an effect on encoding or decoding speed. Choosing unusual color subsampling may make your videos unplayable with some decoders. The choice of codec is more critical. Some codecs require little CPU power (HuffYUV, MJPEG), some require more (Lagarith, Divx, Xvid), some require a lot (h.264).

[David Bethel]

By converting to JPG you used YUV 4:2:0 subsampling.

OK Didn't know that. The images are created by Accurender in AutoCAD. The version I use has options to save the images as tga gif bmp tif & jpg. The tga files are 2.4MB each. For web stuff I use jpg with 5% compression, for animations 1% compression

Your CAD workstation probably doesn't have the HuffYUV codec installed.

I installed it but the machine is very old and runs DOS under Win98SE. I know there is newer stuff around. The main work station is a XP box with Gforce FX 5200 Video card running 1,440 x 900

I found the codec section here in the forum and will test drive them. Right now I run XP on most of my machines. Not looking to update them until I have to. -David

[poisondeathray]

By converting to JPG you used YUV 4:2:0 subsampling.

JPEG can have 4:4:4 variants, but you're right , the most common is subsampled, and if 1-5% compression was used they are for sure subsampled


I haven't looked at the jpg's yet, but is everything ok now for the transitions (ie was it just a image viewing issue) ?

[David Bethel]

Things are getting a lot better. I think that the frames that are still problems are scenes that the camera moves and rotates too much in relation to the distance objects in the scene. Especially if the object have very sharp or defined edges and color borders. IE a black gasket seam between stainless steel wall panels like this. The further away the camera, the smoother the video images. -David

[jagabo]

You need more antialiasing when you render. Those buzzing edges are in your source. If your renderer doesn't allow for more antialiasing render much larger frames (eg 4096x3072) and downsize in VirtualDub.

[poisondeathray]

Also make sure you use the .tiff to render the sequence, not the lossy jpegs.

[David Bethel]

I have the antialiasing set as high it will go for this software. These are produced on a quite old ( 1991 ) release of AutoCAD R13 and Accurender ( AR2 )

I'll checking into the tif format. I remeber some types of tiffs didn't work well. I know that tga is fine.

I'll look into large frames. It takes about 1 minute 20 seconds to render each frame ( about 1,100 per day ) @ 1,024 x 768. The newer software is a bunch slower ( 20 x )


Thansk! Again! -David

[poisondeathray]

sorry, tga is fine; for some reason i thought you were using tiffs; the point is NOT to use jpeg for the actual video

[jagabo]

The buzzing edges aren't caused by color subsampling (color subsampling makes no difference in grayscale areas). They're caused by insufficient antialiasing and were common in 3d rendering in early 90's. You're stuck with them unless you can increase the output resolution. You might try using a lower antialiasing setting in ACAD and rendering large frames. Maybe you can find a compromise solution that doesn't take too long.