Exporting settings - Compression Question

[trantornator]

Hi everyone,

I've been workign with Anime Studio Pro 9 for a bit now, but have been hitting a bit of a wall when I export files.

I've tried exporting with compression but the picture quality tends to look a bit shabby. It works fine if I export as an uncompressed AVI (which I later have to recompress using Windows MovieMaker) but the system crashes if I render more than 1200 frames at a time, and then I have to start over from scratch. (guessing it's partially due to my laptop not being the mightiest of machines, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i3 with an INtel HD Graphics 4000 and shared 4 GB DDR3 Ram)

So I've been rendering 1200 frames at a time and then splicing those together in movie maker. That was ok for short 20-40 second animations but now I want to do a longer 30 minute piece and obviously that's not going to be an option. What compression settings/codecs do you recommend? I'd like to keep a relatively high resolution (Youttube HD) at 24 fps.

[jahnocli]

The best way is to render out .png sequences (one scene at a time so you can keep tabs on what's happening), and then composite them together in After Effects or Premiere or similar. It's a pain in the backside having to re-import the sound files and line them up, but these programs give you WAY more options for assembling your final piece of work. My two pennies...

[AmigaMan]

Yes I always have a folder for each shot and render out to .png image files to that folder. The other advantage of rendering out image files is that should you get any kind of crash at some point (say frame 52) then you can just start rendering again from that point (start at frame 53) and you haven't lost the whole file.
With the editing software I use I just drag the folder onto the timeline and it treats it as a movie file.

[sbtamu]

I do not think Windows Movie maker would work well with image files, tho you can import them, I do not think it would be wise to drag 1000 plus images into MM and then have to drag them into the timeline it would be a total nightmare trying to scroll through all that. I would stick with uncompressed AVI and see what the problem is that is causing the crashes. Your PC is plenty powerful enough to render way over 30 seconds of AVI. Just make sure you do not have some graphic hogging software running while you are rendering. I have an old PC with less power than yours and it has no problem rendering any length as long as I try not to use the PC while rendering.

I would suggest using some other editor other than windows MM but there is nothing wrong with using MM if it all you got. I once made a 5 minute animation using MM to edit it.

[Telemacus]

You can download process explorer (free, made by the people from microsoft, no adverts or other crap) here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx
Just switch off everything you don't need (which is usually a lot) and try again, and see how that goes.
Also, make sure you have plenty of HD space for temporary files. Personally, when my HD is below 30Gig, I tend to run into one problem or another.