exr or hdri ?

[Adam H. Stewart]

This could be one of those questions - how long is a piece of string ?

Using 1.5 Rc3 max 9 and after effects 7 rendering a scene of glowing Tv planes in an almost black environment which file format would be best to save my renders to ?

I did some tests with OpenExr and had a bit of trouble getting them into after effects, I have used hdri in the past and they seem to work fine, but you miss out on the alpha channel and the files are huge. Normally I'd have a chance to do more testing but we are on a crazy deadline hope some kind person out there has already gone through this possibly nightmare and can share their experiences.

Thanks a million as always.

[sv]

I use AFX 7 almost daily with Exr's - but don't have any problems getting them in so can't really advise on what might be wrong there.

In terms of exr vs. hdr it's exr every time - amazing compression, up to 32 bits per channel whereas hdr is only 8 bits per channel, multilayered (although AFX won't read this, i don't think; certainly not out of the box)

Re-reading your post, the reason you might be having problems is because your still on RC3 - i know there were a lot of changes from RCs to SP1 especially around the saving of exr's - i know your on a tight deadline and upgrading is never advised during a project but SP1 has a lot of improvements over the RC's.....remember though that if you do this the models for the camera, sky etc have changed and you'll have to use the legacy option...

[rivoli]

I did some tests with OpenExr and had a bit of trouble getting them into after effects

I use exrs with AE all the time and they work fine (as sv says you can't read any channel apart from rgba without the right plugin though), what kind of problems do you have?

[Adam H. Stewart]

It was a strange problem that appeared last monday at 2am - for some reason I just couldn't open the exr's that I rendered. I tried it on PC and Mac and even on combustion, but the frames came out black. I thought that it might have been a problems with the alpha channel. I just did a bunch of tests with the alpha setting on and off, to see what happens.

We just set up our new farm for 1.5rc3, it would be a bit risky to go to spk.1 now because I've we are using the software dongle and trying to figure things out on 2 hours sleep over the last week things usually get a bit fuzzy :]

I'll try the new exr renders - hopefully they'll work as it seems to be the way of the future and small file size is always better.

Thanks a million

[sv]

when you got black renders as exr this is unfortunately due to RC3.
I remember getting this as well - AFX, Photoshop etc.

I would normally recommend upgrading, but as your in the middle of a project, hard to say.... but SP1 will definitely fix this....