Hi all,

With Carrara 6 pro, should I break the movie into many smaller parts (eg. 1 min. for each) and then finally join them together with windows movie maker?

Thanks in advance
:)

That sounds like a plan.  I like to use Magix music maker 10.  I wish I had Premier or After Effects.

yes. cut to a new scene every 2 - 5 sec. concatenate all the scenes later.

You can do it all for as long as you like, in one go, as many varying scenes, all within Carrara.

Thanks.

@bwtr: If I do it all in one go,

1. is 2G RAM enough for Carrara?
2. Will this slow down the rendering time?
3. Is it difficult to manage frames?

:)

Save yourself some trouble and break it up. In fact for rendering animations that are anything more than tests, you will want to render as seperate frames. If Carrara crashes or your computer, you just start rendering where the program crashed. Or if you need your computer, you can stop rendering and pick up later. After you have rendered all your frames you can use another program to assemble them all at once as a movie. You can also do it in Carrara, but you have to watch that Carrara doesnt oversample your previously rendered images. Besides, it is faster to use another program that supports image sequence import. Look for a program called Fast Movie Processor. It is an old program but it works great for taking rendered image sequences and making movies out of them. Finally, if you watch any films or anything on TV for that matter, you will notice numerous cuts employed. Since, you are going to have cuts anyway, it is better to storyboard your scene with the idea of different shots in mind at the start. Each unique shot can be a different rendering. This gives you more flexibility and will help you organise your ideas. BTW, when I say storyboard I dont mean the one in Carrara. Take some paper or a text document and outline or storyboard your animation. This helps tremendously, especially with lengthy animations.

Not an expert though--
1.Yes

1. Can not think why
   3.Not clear on what you mean by "manage" frames?

The big trouble with all movie rendering is the, painful, time rendering takes. Having other computers, note the plural, and making use of the Carrara Render Nodes is a huge benefit.
(Rendering is a slow process with any app so dont blame Carrara.)

ps. Once you get involved I think you will think a 30 second movie is HUGE! It takes a lot of patience to do movies that run for minutes!

Render as image files and a good storyboard helps with where you cut it.

Virtualdub is free to convert your images to .AVI or other formats.

Rendering an animation as image files is also a good idea if the area in which you live is subject to frequent or unexpected power outages. The computer will save these in sequence and if the power goes out the files rendered up to that point will still be saved. If an animation is rendered as an AVI or QT file and the power goes out the file will probably be corrupted, and all progress on it could well be lost. The only caveat that I can see is that I haven't been able to import image files into Windows Movie Maker successfully. Maybe someone else has.

Thank you for your tips, UVDan,Miss Nancy, dbigers, bwtr, Tashar59 and danamo!

@bwtr: What I mean "manage" frames is that at any time we could only see time frames for 6 seconds in the sequencer tray. For a 30 min. movie, it seems that we need to move back and forth in sequencer tray for editing frames. That's why it is difficult to manage frames for me.

Even after unexpected power outages? This is incredible! Carrara will know where the rendering  stopped last time and continue?

1. But Rendering as separate images( I think they are in jpeg format for saving disk spaces), will this decrease the quality of a movie? Or should we use bmp for better quality?

2. http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=74614&highlight=render+node
   With 1 license of Carrara 6 pro, it is said that we could setup max. 5 render nodes to increase the rendering speed? Only 1 pc with licensed C6 and have other 4  pc installed render node program? Is it difficult to setup this kind of render nodes?

Thanks in advance
:)

Attached Link: Energy Through Resource Reclamation

I made a video, and sliced all the smaller scenes together in Movie Maker, added the music and voice over narrations from Adobe Audition in Movie Maker as well. The program I used to put all the images together into a 32fps movie was Bongo Animation for Rhinoceros 3D (see the Rhino Forum). 

I made it in 2005 it's rough, really rough. Long breaks between scenes were designed because I used this as a professional presentation to the Clark County Water District. This was my first attempt at a video, it took me three months to learn, render, and assemble. Oh, and I didn't know what a storyboard was... ..additionally, I forgot to credit Mason Williams for his permission to use the music. Thanx Mason, you're a champ!

If you have the patience to wait for a 84M file, follow the link provided.

Hi cryptojoe, I got "404 not found" from you link.  :(**
**

I'll try it again in a little bit. Thanx.

**imagination304 said "**Even after unexpected power outages? This is incredible! Carrara will know where the rendering  stopped last time and continue?"- 
While Carrara won't neccesarily "remember" where it stopped, it is a simple matter to check the number of the last rendered frame, or image file where you saved it and then to scrub, or advance the timeline to the frame just past that point and continue rendering the rest of that sequence.

*"But Rendering as separate images( I think they are in jpeg format for saving disk spaces), will this decrease the quality of a movie? Or should we use bmp for better quality?"
*I do recommend saving your image files at the highest quality, lossless format. such as .bmp and then, when the animations are finished rendering and edited and assembled into the final movie, only then applying a video compression format. Applying compression to a sequence made up of .jpeg files would add a lot more artifacts and grunge than if you had applied the same compression to .bmps, or some other lossless file type.

Attached Link: Energy Through Resource Reclamation

...if you right click on the link, you can save the file, otherwise you will wait a very long time for it to all download to your media player.

Enjoy

You can make animations using Windows Movie Maker, the minimum frame duration is 0.125, you can set that in the Options by pressing the spin buttons before loading the frames. You can also zoom in and drag the duration down.

I found the limitation with Movie maker was when I wanted to add lots of sound tracks, the video did not cause a problem.

I've been rendering short sections of movies from Carrara, converting the AVI into a WMV using a convertion tool and then using Premiere Elements 3 which I bought for about £60.

Importing Image files in a sequence is very easy in Premiere, but I'm sure there must be other inexpensive alternatives that can do it.

F/X is a factor also if you want to add it I dont think you could add any of it to AVI files.

Quote - F/X is a factor also if you want to add it I dont think you could add any of it to AVI files.

You should be ok with After Effects and AVI as long as you don't choose an unsupported compression codec, I can't find a page with the details but I would suggest one of the standard PAL or NTSC formats with no compression. The attached link suggests using DivX or XVid.

The shake manual says that it supports AVI and other video formats but it can't use temporary files if you do so it will require more memory and will take longer.

Combustion mentions that it supports AVI for audio but does not specifically mention what video format it supports but I'd presume from that it would support AVI for video too.

Coming from a TV background, I find that editing video "rushes" is simpler than editing a set of frames as I can simply drag to shorten or extend a clip. I've deliberately rendered longer clips than I expect to be need in the final version so I can make small adjustments to the timing. In the screenshot below, you can see how easy it is for me to hold the closeup for a little longer by simply dragging end of the clip.

When I did the stop motion film Ratobat, I converted each scene from frames to WMV (as that was what Movie Maker supported) and then edited together each of the scenes. I saw a talk at the BFI a year or so back where they were using Premiere Pro with one file per frame and this allowed them to edit on a low rez version. They then exited and by renaming folders, swapped the low rez files with high rez ones to allow them to open the project again and generate some output, so I can see how sometimes working with single frames might be better.

But to summarise and to backup aquiavic, you need to ensure that your entire pipeline, animation software, effects and video editing support formats that you can work with otherwise you will end up having to convert files all the time with potential for lost of quality. I've also found that trying to work with non standard sized caused me a problem and I switched to having all my video in 720x576.

All the best with your film.