Hello,

I am wondering if someone can recommend a good video codec to combine a rendered image sequence into a lossless video clip to use in video editing applications. I have tried using the Quicktime Animation codec, but it always drops a frame, for example, a 0-90 frame animation gets combined into a 89 frame video clip. This causes problems when trying to fade clips into one another, as the animations will not line up. Can anyone make a recommendation?

thx

3ds max 2014
Dell Precision T7500
Win 7 64bit
Dual Six Core 2.66GHz
24Gb RAM
Quadro 6000

I strongly recommend rendering to sequence of uncompressed files rather than to collapsed avi or other movie clip. It is better both for later compositing and aditing.

Keith, it depends on what you’re using to compress.  We use Adobe Media Encoder (or Adobe Premiere) and have good luck using WMV or H.264, depending on the client’s needs.  The H.264 looks good, but we’ve encountered a few clients that have difficulties playing it.  WMV can also look good, but the file sizes tend to be a little larger with comparable quality.  But anyone running a recent version of Windows should have no problems with playback, and they link into PowerPoint easily.

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I’m using Lagarith Lossless codec couple of years.

Royal Ghost | http://veda3d.com

I’ve used the Lagarith a few times I think, and I also got dropped frames, which is the big problem. Now my animation timeline starts at frame 0, which yields 91 frames in 3 seconds of animation, so I’m wondering if I should be starting the timeline at frame 1 instead. Perhaps the extra frame is causing the encoder for Quicktime Animation or Lagarith to drop the frames?

thx

3ds max 2014
Dell Precision T7500
Win 7 64bit
Dual Six Core 2.66GHz
24Gb RAM
Quadro 6000

For many reasons I render my animations to series of *.TGA files. I use Adoe Premiere (currently CS5.5)to edit the animations into viewable formats mostly *.WMV. I have received reports from customers that they have difficulties with H.264. I think using premiere defaults is the reason for these. Changing the profile from Main to Baseline helps a lot, however I have no Idea whet the setting does.

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I allways render in PNG image sequence and convert it into AVI with Lagarith…

I always render to a series of PNG’s and used to put them together in Premier Pro and am now dipping my feet into the After Effects world. It has much more control and better effects and I would recommend it to anyone that is thinking about getting into the Adobe realm of compiling their footage.
To expand a bit for those that care, I am actually compositing a standard render pass (MR) with an Ambient Occlusion pass in AE and then linking that into PP because I have a better feel for arranging things on the timeline and getting it to flow with multiple cameras and shots.

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You can try PNG codec in Quicktime. It’s lossless, has good PNG compression (usually smaller than using seperate PNG sequence files), supports alpha channel.

To expand on my previous post, I do use After Effects to create an uncompressed AVI or MOV and then use Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder to compress the file.  For a typical animation, we usually piece together several shots, each comprised of 3 to 7 passes that are combined in AE.  We’ve found that Premiere has some stability issues with sequences of stills and prefers an uncompressed movie file.

Unfortunately it does take a lot of not-cheap software to create something great.  It can be done with free or inexpensive software, but they tend to have limitations that we can’t work around or deal with.

3ds Max Design 2012 64-bit - Subscription Advantage Pack / PU10
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

One more question, when rendering an image sequence say for 3 seconds of video at 30fps, do you set the animation timeline in 3ds max to 1 or 0? Rendering from 0-90 produces 91 frames, so just wondering how critical that extra frame is.

thx

3ds max 2014
Dell Precision T7500
Win 7 64bit
Dual Six Core 2.66GHz
24Gb RAM
Quadro 6000