Trouble with LONG animation

[dingebre]

LW finished a long animation, 2880 frames and because I was using a network renderer, I rendered frames.

Now, SE is brought to its knees when I try to load all the images. I've considered loading them in smaller groups, render an animation, then load the sequence of animations and render the final output. Tedious.

I've also consisdered using LW to load the sequence and simply re-render it on one machine to an animation but I can't find a LW mpeg encoder.

I suspect it's the real-time nature of SE and trying to keep 2 gig of images in memory.

Are there other tools out there to take frames to an MPEG file?
I'm open to any suggestions, really.

Thanks

[Greenlaw]

I suspect it's the real-time nature of SE and trying to keep 2 gig of images in memory.

Are there other tools out there to take frames to an MPEG file?
I'm open to any suggestions, really.

Thanks

Hi,

I'm not an SE user but I have a simple suggestion. Couldn't you break your frames into multiple segments? In other words, bring 200 or 300 frames of your animation into SE and write out a shorter MPEG, and repeat this for each segment. When your done, sequence your MPEGs on the timeline.

DRG

[SBowie]

Is MPEG the final target for some reason (MPEG2 for DVD ,for example)? Or are you thinking it would be a suitable intermediate format for import into an SE project - because if the latter case is true, there are probably better options.

[dingebre]

Absolutely I could do it in shorter segments. It's just a bit tedious. MPEG for a couple of reasons. My clients are out of town and I want to be able to upload the animation to my ftp site for them to download and view. Second, the final version will be put on a DVD for presentation. LW renders several animation types, including the NewTek SE codecs. I was mostly wondering what other user of SpeedEdit do to assemble an animation from a long series of frames.

Thanks for the advice.

[SBowie]

MPEG for a couple of reasons.MPEG2 for DVD, sure - MPEG1 (usually referred to as simply "MPEG") for near universal compatability if not quality, ok. The SpeedHQ codec would give you better quality than either of those for a LW-SE intermediate (and for editing), but wouldn't serve the other purposes well.

[UnCommonGrafx]

The best advice is the advice given but not: use anything else that will compile the animation.
To mind come these apps:
AE
FU formerly known as digital fusion
photoshop cs3, I've read
Mirage/Aura/TvPaint
Etc.

I would compile it once in a high-quality format that can sit on the SE timeline for rendering to mpeg. Or that would work with tmpgenc.

Yeah, the paradigm they have going for working with stills isn't panning out well with larger numbers of images.

[KiloWatkins]

Good thoughts, but I've not had but to simply wait with 10k frames. So, are they TGA's? If not, did you change SE Prefs to 1 frame? Did you install the 3GB switch? Did you set SE Cache to another drive? How much freespace is on the VM/PageFile C:? Rendering the frames in LW as a background and correct Camera setting as uncompressed would work also, befor putting on an SE timeline.

GoodLuck

[Adrian@Stufish]

1) If possible have all the stuff on your local machine
2) In my experience the hang is from tring to open the directory in the file-bin.
3) If you've rendered a TGA sequence then drag the whole directory from the bin onto the timeline.
4) if you've got LW on the same machine as the SpeedEdit (or if you download and install the codec pack on the LW machine) you can use a single machine running LW with the image seq loaded as background to render straignt to speed HQ codec, which seems as good a standard as any to keep your material in!

[Lightwolf]

3) If you've rendered a TGA sequence then drag the whole directory from the bin onto the timeline.
Don't, that is exactly what brings SE to its knees.
Drag the first image of the TGA sequence onto the Timeline/Storyboard and all is well.

Cheers,
Mike

[Adrian@Stufish]

Here we have a direct conflict of experience - who knows what it depends on - available cache space or ram perhaps ? - I've got 4Gb ram and 0.6TB free for the cache).
I have no trouble dragging directories onto the timeline (other than that they are treated as sub-projects so I can't drag anamorphed images into a widescreen project because you can't tell SpeedEdit how wide they are).
But if I try to open a directory of thousands of files in the bin, SpeedEdit dies on me!

just a thought, make sure you don't have any numbers at the START of the file name - if you do then SE seems to try to make every image the default length for a still image - so if that's set at 10 seconds then your clip is being seen as 300 times it's proper length in NTSC! - and that is a killer.

[dingebre]

Thank you everyone for all the advice!

BTW, what is the 3Gb switch? I have but 2 gig in my machine.

David

[SBowie]

Check the SE readme, from the Start menu ... details in there, iirc.