animation frame format?

[skogskalle]

Hi!

I havent done any animationwork for a looong time (and havent done much at all really), but just got a project with a short (15-20 sec) interior animation.

I plan to save the frames as still images and use After Effects to make the video.

What fileformat should I render to? I only need 8-bit. Is png a good choice? Or tga? tif?

thanks
K

[AJ Jefferies]

TIFF and PNG are both fine and offer lossless compression. I haven't used TGA in years, so can't recommend it.

Personally, I always save EXRs. AE is actually better at handling 32 bit images than Photoshop - you can use colour adjustments like curves...etc. with no problem.

[skogskalle]

Thanks!

Ok, maybe exr is the way to go. Im not sure I need it, but it cant hurt. Only a 500 frame animation so disc-space wont be an issue...

[skogskalle]

Ok, so I have a huge problem now. Any help huuugely appreciated.

I am just finished with my animation. Happy with the image quality/time etc. But now I tried to render out an animated preview for my client to OK, before I do the final render. Changed the format from avi to custom (rendering a png image sequence since the avi couldnt save the correct image ratio for some reason, and BAM max crashes. Tried to reload the file and try again - BAM crash. Tried restarting my computer and started to render the preview, BAM crash. Tried to load a previus file - same problem.

Aaaand whats worse. Now i tried to do a normal render and max crashes as soon as the render is complete.

Tried to merge the whole scene into a fresh max-file and it crashes on import.

So - what the hell do I do now? I cant get a preview to my client, a small problem, and I cant even render the animation, a huge problem.

Help?
K

[skogskalle]

ok, maybe got it working. Switched from direct3D to Nitrous and the preview at least start to render. Fingers crossed

[skogskalle]

Rendering seems to work OK too. Didnt crash on the first try atleast... just hoping I will be able to get the animation out the door before it starts breaking down again!

[Alan Iglesias]

Tried to merge the whole scene into a fresh max-file and it crashes on import...

Good to see you have things going but if you run in to this again, try merging objects one by one until you find the offending one.

-Alan

[skogskalle]

Thanks Alan,

will try that if it starts crashing again. This time I think something in Direct3D broke down, and its not scene-related, but im not sure. Will try to repair the 3dsmax installation too to make sure everything is OK, but right now its rendering so Im afraid to touch anything at the moment

[stevesideas]

Thanks!

Ok, maybe exr is the way to go. Im not sure I need it, but it cant hurt. Only a 500 frame animation so disc-space wont be an issue...

If you are super confident you won't carry out much post work to the final sequence (mainly exposure) then 16bit pngs or even jpgs would suffice. EXR files are generally massive especially when rendering out plus 1920x1080.

[skogskalle]

Hello!

The animation is finished and client was happy so all good now. Didnt have any more crashes after switching to Nitrous from Direct3D. The only reason I used direct3d in the first place was that it showed animated textures in the viewports and nitrous didnt. The animation was of a cinema and the camera movement had to be a little bit timed to the movie showing on the screen so it was really helpful to see it play in the viewport.

I ended up rendering to exr. Did some curves and small adjustments in AE but nothing big so could probably have used png in this case. The files do get big... about 8 mb each I think.