Combining several animation/video files/transition visible

ps2000

Hello,

I have a longer animation (around 10 seconds) and rendering one second takes around 5 hours. So I render the animation in several parts (first frame 0-30 than 31-60 and so on).

I then connect the several video files with a video editing software (openshot in my case).

The problem is that I have slightly visible stutters/interruptions at the transition points and I don't know why. 

Any ideas? Should I render from frame 30-60 for the second part? Or is it maybe a problem with the video editor? Shouldn't it work without a hitch?

Thanks 

Zilvergrafix

Can you post your video?, I assume you are using iRay at 3840x2160K? one second 5 hours?, are you doing 60fps? Rendering as Raw video Unprocessed and not H264 or NV codec?

Had you tried animating using Filament Engine inside DazStudio?, my examples below, they were processed in less than 5 minutes.

ps2000

I render in daz-studio because I want the iray lighting. I don't think I do 60fps. Well, it's the normal walk-cycle aniblock for V7 indoors with hdri-lighting stretched/lengthened to 10 seconds. The resolution is full hd and one frame renders in around 10 minutes, so 30 frames need around 5 hours (Alltogether I have 325 frames). Indoor scenes render a lot longer in my experience (I have a GTX 1080ti and a 1070). I don't think that I can choose the codec it renders in in daz-studio? After rendering it asks me in what format/codec I want to save the file. 

It renders just fine in my opinion, but I have the transition problem if I put the several clips together

WendyLuvsCatz

rendering an image series would be simpler and you likely need to go from frame 30 for your next sequence as it would tween from 30 to 31

Zilvergrafix

ps2000 said:

 I don't think that I can choose the codec it renders in in daz-studio? After rendering it asks me in what format/codec I want to save the file. 

It renders just fine in my opinion, but I have the transition problem if I put the several clips together

Then is a problem in your video editing software, because you had confirmed it renders fine, and I assume your video segments are ok for you when they are independent files. 

Fishtales

What I do is render to an image series and also drop the number of iterations to speed up rendering. On some renders you can go as low as 100 but others need more. Render one image from the animation at different iterations until you get one that gives a decent image at the fastest time and use that to render the series. When making the video from your series of images you wont see that much of a difference in quality as you can use different codecs to improve it and there will be filters you can use to sharpen and denoise.

benniewoodell

What's your convergence percentage? You can set it to like 85% for an animation and you won't notice the loss of detail, if any. Also, turn off everything in the frame except your character and turn draw dome to off. Render the character by itself and then do the background seperately, it will cut your render time immensely. Just make sure you do an image sequence with png for the alpha channel. Then just plop it into davinci or after effects and you can comp them together no problemo. I had a 1080ti and was rendering frames at 3 minutes or less this way. 

ps2000

WendyLuvsCatz said:

rendering an image series would be simpler and you likely need to go from frame 30 for your next sequence as it would tween from 30 to 31

Ok, I will render the second part from frame 30 tonight and see if that makes a difference. What do you mean by "it would tween from 30 to 31"? Sorry I am not a native speaker.

Thanks. 

WendyLuvsCatz

the movement in the scene tweens that is interpolates between frames say if you pose an arm up then a second later pose it down, the inbetween frames will have it part way

ps2000

Fishtales said:

What I do is render to an image series and also drop the number of iterations to speed up rendering. On some renders you can go as low as 100 but others need more. Render one image from the animation at different iterations until you get one that gives a decent image at the fastest time and use that to render the series. When making the video from your series of images you wont see that much of a difference in quality as you can use different codecs to improve it and there will be filters you can use to sharpen and denoise.

How do you get a video-file out of the image series? Do you also use a video-editing software?

Do you see a difference if you use a image-series? Shouldn't it look the same?

I know that there is room to improve the render times but that's not my main issue. Even if I reduce the time considerably, I will probably still need to make 2-3 separate files and the transition issue would remain. 

Thanks.

WendyLuvsCatz

most video editing software will import image series as a video.

I don't have Openshot so don't know if it can, if not other software like Virtualdub can.

I Googled it and it looks like kdenlive which does

ps2000

WendyLuvsCatz said:

the movement in the scene tweens that is interpolates between frames say if you pose an arm up then a second later pose it down, the inbetween frames will have it part way

So you mean that maybe the missing interpolation between the frames at the transition of the two clips is causing the issue?

Thanks.

WendyLuvsCatz

ps2000 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

the movement in the scene tweens that is interpolates between frames say if you pose an arm up then a second later pose it down, the inbetween frames will have it part way

So you mean that maybe the missing interpolation between the frames at the transition of the two clips is causing the issue?

Thanks.

yes 

Zilvergrafix

ps2000 said:

How do you get a video-file out of the image series? Do you also use a video-editing software?

Your software does that too

https://www.openshot.org/es/blog/2011/01/19/image-sequence-magic-auto-detection/ ;

ps2000

Zilvergrafix said:

ps2000 said:

How do you get a video-file out of the image series? Do you also use a video-editing software?

Your software does that too

https://www.openshot.org/es/blog/2011/01/19/image-sequence-magic-auto-detection/ ;

Thanks.

I have absolutely no experience with video-editing software. I downloaded the next best free software to glue the clips together. Never thought that I would run into problems. 

Ivy

WendyLuvsCatz said:

rendering an image series would be simpler and you likely need to go from frame 30 for your next sequence as it would tween from 30 to 31

Yup this is best solution

ps2000

Well, then I will try an image-series. But do you see a difference compared to a movie (rendering type)?

Fishtales

ps2000 said:

Fishtales said:

What I do is render to an image series and also drop the number of iterations to speed up rendering. On some renders you can go as low as 100 but others need more. Render one image from the animation at different iterations until you get one that gives a decent image at the fastest time and use that to render the series. When making the video from your series of images you wont see that much of a difference in quality as you can use different codecs to improve it and there will be filters you can use to sharpen and denoise.

How do you get a video-file out of the image series? Do you also use a video-editing software?

Do you see a difference if you use a image-series? Shouldn't it look the same?

I know that there is room to improve the render times but that's not my main issue. Even if I reduce the time considerably, I will probably still need to make 2-3 separate files and the transition issue would remain. 

Thanks.

I use Vegas Pro to make the movie.

I normally just render the image series all at the one time. 

Sven Dullah

Why offer advice on rendering speed and suggesting rendering to an image sequense when this has no impact on the motion of the animation? Why not instead offer some tips on successfully joining aniblocks together, as this is most likely the issue here? In my book it would be the wisest thing to first set up the complete animation so it works properly, and use OpenGL or filament to testrender and check that the motion is ok. Then it shouldn't matter how many parts the OP chooses to render it out in. Rendering to an image series has some advantages but also adds additional steps to stiching things together, but that should be a different story.

Fishtales

@Sven Dullah

Rendering to a video isn't recommended in Studio as it can corrupt and you lose the video and have to start again. With an image series if some of them are corrupt, or you see poke through that you missed or one object passing through another, you can render only those images instead of the whole thing.

I have used Filament once to test it and it is fast and looks alright.

This is Iray.

This is Filament, which rendered much faster.

ps2000

I don't think that the aniblock is the problem in my case, because I only used one and lenghtened it. I didn't add the same aniblock several times (or different aniblocks). 

But I will check it out and render a longer segment of the aniblock.

What exactly are the disadvantages of an image series? Shouldn't the result be the same if I string them together in openshot?

Zilvergrafix

Sven Dullah said:

Why offer advice on rendering speed and suggesting rendering to an image sequense when this has no impact on the motion of the animation? 

Why not? because any user asking for help we can decide 2 options:

1-aditional help does not harm anyone 

2-Ignore the help and look other forum topics, not my problem and I'm already a top star in nothing.

...as a human we decided the option 1 

Sven Dullah

Fishtales said:

@Sven Dullah

Rendering to a video isn't recommended in Studio as it can corrupt and you lose the video and have to start again. With an image series if some of them are corrupt, or you see poke through that you missed or one object passing through another, you can render only those images instead of the whole thing.

I understand. Just saying I've done (keyframed) animation in DS for about 10 years and never had a problem with corrupt frames. So I will continue to render to movie as it works well for what I'm doing. And I testrender in Open GL to avoid things like objects passing through eachother;) Must have been lucky, or maybe 3DL is more stable than IRay?

 

This is Filament, which rendered much faster.

...which was exactly my point...

Sven Dullah

Zilvergrafix said:

Sven Dullah said:

Why offer advice on rendering speed and suggesting rendering to an image sequense when this has no impact on the motion of the animation? 

Why not? because any user asking for help we can decide 2 options:

1-aditional help does not harm anyone 

2-Ignore the help and look other forum topics, not my problem and I'm already a top star in nothing.

...as a human we decided the option 1 

Fair point, I'll rest my case:)

marble

Just for the record, I animate short clips from image sequences and then do all the editing, joining, transitions, etc. in Da Vinci Resolve which is free and pretty powerful. I've tried some of the other free applications and also a Sony Vegas version but I prefer Da Vinci.

WendyLuvsCatz

Hitfilm Express or Blender are my preferred free video editors.

The latter though a bit difficult to learn at first (being Blender )  is actually the most robust as I can easily do 8K videos, any size and framerate for that matter, I have only scratched the surface too.

It has no issues with codecs so far either, Hitfilm only recently started recognising my Twinmotion mp4's Blender's video editor seems happy with any video I toss at it.

Ivy

ps2000 said:

Well, then I will try an image-series. But do you see a difference compared to a movie (rendering type)?

What makes rendering in Image serise better than Movie ,

1) You can stop your rendering at any time and restart and pick up where you left off. (specially helpful if daz crashes during rendering )

2) When rendering in image series  you wil have the ability to cut the scene and splice or make a change to a scene image serise, which is great for post working to fix a few frame of images if you might have had poke through  on

3) Does away the need for IK-chain. solutions for things  such as a guy picking up a box where you can stop your rendering and parent the box and resume rendering. a 100x faster.

I use Adobe premiere.  But Hitfilm will do the same thing. Import your Images as a series,  I start by makeing 2 separate work folders one for my scene editing for my renders files &  one for my film editing.  move your finished animations from the scene editor to the film editor so you can add sound etc.  once you practiced film editing a while you'll find it much easier to render animation .it just takes a little messing around learning what works best.

I do animation the old school way and that is in image series. it took me 30 days to do this is a animation I did all in daz studio rendered with Iray

Click to play . Best viewed in 1080 HD

 

ps2000

Can maybe somebody give me advice on how to make the image series into a video in da vinci?

I am stuck somehow. I accomplished to import the image series into the media pool and I also got them all into the timeline.

But the individual images are shown far too long (around several seconds).

I tried to decrease the time each picture is shown with the "trim edit mode button" (like shown in some tutorials for diashows), but that doesn't work.

I think each picture should only be shown around 1/30 seconds (since I rendered with 30 frames per second).

How do you do it?

Thanks

Faeryl Womyn

ps2000 maybe this can help you