Apr 25, 2010
Are your HD animations really HD?
Written on January 18th, 2010
Unless you are very new to Blender, you probably know that you can render both images and videos. However, while it seems like there are a limited number of choices for video output, yet there are actually a ton of them. You just have to know where to look. I am sure there are a few of you who know exactly what I am talking about and laughing at my ignorance.
Here's the story: I was working with Blender for a project in the forum yesterday and while rendering I came across a major problem with the quality of the background in the videos. Naturally I tried all of the video output choices. 2.5 does not have good video rendering yet-at least for me-so I was forced into doing this in 2.49. In any case, it finally came down to using the AVI codec choice and choosing the Full Frames (Uncompressed) option to finally get it to look like it did when rendering the individual images. But wait! There's more! My 10 second animation was 1.44GB - yes, gigabytes. Unacceptable.
So how did I solve this problem? Well, there is one setting that I neglected to look through until this morning. I have tons of control over the settings for the video, many of which I still do not understand, but it helped greatly in trying to figure out how to make my video look good without the obnoxious file size. I guess I can format this a bit like a tutorial to show you what is going on.
If you are in Blender and in the render settings, you'll want to change the file output to be 'AVI codec'. Using this allows you to choose from a bunch of different codecs that have their own way of making the file size small while trying to make the image look good. I say 'trying' because some of them flat out look like crap. When you have the AVI codec choice chosen, we have to choose which codec that we want to use. Typically I will choose DIV or XVID as the codec because they seem to be the ones with the best quality. It seems the ones with more options (as I'll explain next) can give you better quality and file size.
Anyways, for DIV and XVID there is a button that is labeled 'configure'. This is where the magic happens. I find that the default settings usually do not give you the best quality or speed, but somewhere in the middle. Every codec is going to have a different popup for the available settings. The settings you particularly want to look out for are ones where you can change the quality of the video. This will probably be a slider bar that you can use to gauge between file size (or speed) and video quality. I like going high quality because usually, at least for me, the file size isn't too big of a deal when using a codec (other than the Full Frames one). Plus, if I find the file size is too big I can just drop the quality down a little bit.
Another setting you want to watch out is labeled Profile or something like that. This will consist of a dropdown list and it will have all sorts of sizes that you can use. Typically they will say things like Home Theater, 1080HD, Mobile, Portable...things like that. I am not completely sure how much this effects quality, but since I usually want my animations in HD, I usually find and choose the HD one.
I won't really go over anything else in too much detail. I do not know what many of the different settings do or mean, all I know is that to get the best video renders, you probably want to use a codec and you want to take a look at the settings I mentioned above and change it for your needs. Now you know why some people who tell you their render is in HD have images and videos that do not look good. Size is not the only factor in making high def images.
Category: blender Tags: codec, HD, quality, render, animation, videoComments
Hehe, most of the time people go thinking an image with the size of, say 1024x768 on an HD screen will make it look AWESOME. which it wont so these kinds od topics cant be mentioned enough :P
I see...the problem is that it is hard to stop random garbles like that. I can't just add it to the blacklist. It also seems like my Bad Behavior add-on has not been working...this is the second one it let by. I guess I could put URLs on the blacklist. I used to get a bunch of email like that.
Couldnt you add two problems to solve? :P Or make two problems and the answer of both added together is put in a box? :P Or get captcha thingies ^^
I use xvid codec to HD render. But there is a problem: when I render in Sony vegas 8 my final video has black frames. When I edit this video in Vegas, I can see a red frame. How can I correct it?
Hmmm, I've never used Vagas, so I cannot be too sure. If I were to guess, it could be that it is trying to change the number of frames per second and something goes wrong and it throws in black/red frames. My other guess would be the codec, I suggest trying another codec to see if that is what it is, otherwise I would try to see if frame count effects it. But to honest, I do not really know.
@icarusve: I get a red frame in Vegas as well when I render using the ffmpeg setting. From what I've found though, is that this red frame is dropped in the final Vegas render. For me, ffmpeg is a great codec (quality vs. file size is outstanding), but I've gone to rendering out image sequences and importing them into Vegas for greater control. Hope this helps! :-)
I use the K-Lite xvid codec in Vegas 8 to compress my videos. I know that any xvid codec it uses in virtualDub and don't see the red frames. Do you now how can I make to render a track of video and take a different audio track to render both in a same track (finally a video with audio.)