Hi,
I rarely post here but I had to since I found this post. Just yesterday I started having this EXACT same problem except for one detail.... I am not doing any video post. I render out robotic simulations for my company in 3DS MAX 2011 64-bit on a Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit install. No issues at all. However, as of Friday of last week, I have been trying to export a standard 1280x720 HDTV uncompressed AVI file of 4500 frames. It would generally create a 20 gig file or so. But immediately upon finishing the AVI, it suddenly creates a temp file of some sort and then replaces my original 20 gig file with a .99 gig AVI file that is all black. It can be played by anything including windows media player and VLC player but the file is nothing but black. I even pulled it into After Effects thinking it had some weird post process done to it that I hadn’t seen before… but it’s still all black. I watch the render window and everything is fine. I can render out an AVI of about 200 frames and everything’s fine. And I do the whole thing, 7 hours of rendering, and at the last second the original AVI disappears and is replaced with the 1 gig AVI. I don’t get it. What the heck am I supposed to do about this? I have checked all of my settings and I never do anything different with my animations. They are all very simple settings, scanline rendered with advanced lighting. No special post processes or anything, no special effects or plugins needed… just standard objects, lights, and then hitting render with the scanline renderer.

And now this has suddenly popped up as a problem. I have even re-rendered it twice to other hard drives to make sure there’s not some weird size limitation, even in spite of looking at prior renderings of 20+ gigs and more on the same hard drive. Nothing has made a difference yet.

Surely this is some kind of bug right?
Thanks for your help in advance.
Jason

Oh yeah, it says uncompressed in the first line.

Don’t think so, and there couldn’t have been a difference between the 2009 and 2010 versions in that respect.

No I haven’t tried the RAM player - thanks for the suggestion.

Excellent guess, I’m encoding to WMV and Windows Media Encoder doesn’t appear to take an image sequence as input.

Thanks for the suggestion - I’ll look into that.

Sorry, should have included that earlier.

Max 2010 64-bit
Windows XP Pro x64 SP2 on HP xw6400 workstation (2x Xeon 5150 @ 2.66GHz, 4 GB RAM)
Images were 720x364 24-bit PNGs without alpha; 2225 frames at 15fps (just a test run for now; the final animation will be larger and 30fps)

When it didn’t work first time I started with a fresh instance of 3ds max (using the DesignVIZ.mentalray template) so there’s nothing at all in the scene and all settings should be at their defaults other than the frame rate. The video post setup was indeed the minimal one you described.

By the way, there’s no need to do any rendering at all, you get the same effect if you tell video post to repeat a still image for more than 1GB worth of frames. Watch what happens to the sizes of the AVI files as they’re generated, using Windows Explorer.

Ok, thanks for the info - I had visions of rendering 2k+ frames :P

I’ll have a play later and see what happens.

Yes, it appears to be enabled by default but there’s nothing in the list. It’s exactly the same in Max 2009, which works correctly.

Thanks, Steve. I’ll add this to the master bugs thread.

Don’t forget that the Bugs thread is only really a convenience for other users - not a means to inform AME.

The Defect report submissions form is the place to do that.

Steve,
Rendered 2500 frames 160x120 to 24 bit PNG, no alpha.
Video Post to Uncompressed AVI without issue.

3ds Max Design 2010, XP Pro SP3

How big is the resultant AVI? Issue appears to be with a file greater than 2GB.
I used the same size image as Rich for the same number of frames and definitely got the problem.

Btw, a single image for the required number of frames is enough to test this - no need to render all the frames first.

Steve,
I think that is about the AVI limit. I’ve run into that before.
My final file was only about 190mb.