Hello,

This may be a very easy question but I'm a bit confused.  I have a program that renders out an animation in mov format and plays beautifully on qt player.  I have a pc.  So I try to edit it with windows movie maker and it can't read mov format.  So I convert mov to avi first and i get this terrible jerk in my beautiful animation.  Next I convert each mov frame to a .bmp and load that in windows movie maker and get an ok looking animation but the quality of picture is now lower and the animation doesn't look as clear.  I've noticed on other avi's I get this jerk that an mov doesn't get if its like a 360 turn.  Can someone explain this? 

the jerkiness during the playback may not be an indication of something actually in the movie itself but rather in the player's inability to decompress and feed the frames to your frame buffer in a timely manner. Some movie players have the option to 'stay on track'; with timing and skip frames as needed. You may be witnessing its ugly side effect.

Some movie players are fast at decompressing a compressed movie (i.e. applying the codec's algorithm and generating trhe pixels). Others may be slower but you may have options to use acceleration. Perhaps your viewer doesn't use them?

Then there's the choice of compressors (or codecs). The benefit of a codec is that it can significantly reduce filesize, and since disk i/o bandwidth is often the limiting bottleneck especially with large image sizes (widthxheight) of the movie clips. Often times nowadays it takes less time to decompress the compressed stream than to read it uncompressed from disk.

If you want to compare apples with apples (or with windows for that matter), you'll want to make sure they use the same codec (compressor) and have similar options enabled/disabled such as for hardware acceleration: Quicktime palyer, WIndows Media player, WIndows Media classic, Irfanview... whatever you use, don't assume they all mimic eachother.

As for the codec or compressor, it can have a big impact on the resulting filesize or video quality. If you can  find a common denominator, such as the same compressor in Quicktime as codec in avi file, perhaps something like using one of the copmmon Indeo or mpeg4 or h.264 codecs, then be sure also to give them all the same parameters (framerate & bitrate especially!)

-Philip

addendum: I recommend using ffmpeg as a free converter between flv, mov, avi, mpeg, mp4 and many other formats for both video, image sequence and audio. By using the various command line options to set the bitrate, thye audio bitrate, the frame rate, etc... you get to realize what matters and how these affect what you end up seeing.

so with apple its compression and with windows its codec?  The codec thing is something I need help with also.  For instance which codec is best for a poser animation?  Do you have to purchase decent codecs.  I've used some of the selections before just as a test and neither of the players have been able to playback file?

"codec" is short for "compressor-decompressor" and refers to the small program that does the work of compressing the file size when storing the movie to disk, and decompressing during playback. It's fairly common for the programs to be called a codec regardless of whether they're for mac or windows.

If you're going to be changing the format of your images, it's really going to be better if you don't use any compression at all, until you're ready to distribute the final result. Most compression schemes lose a small amount of data that was in the original; as you save repeatedly using different methods, you lose a little more each time, resulting in graininess.

There are some compression schemes that don't result in the loss of data, and they're nice for intermediate work. One I really like is called Lagarith, and you can get it for Windows free at http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html.

There's no "best" codec for Poser animations. If you don't have very complex materials in your scene, and you have large areas that are the same color, you'll get good results with Lagarith. If you're going to distribute it to other people, I think DivX is a good choice; the codec is also free, and you have a lot of control over the quality. If you're going to send it out for streaming, to YouTube for example, I would avoid compression altogether; they have a 2 Gb file size limit, and sending your video uncompressed works a lot better with them.

DivX I don't think is fre, unless things changed dramatically since last time I checked. Xvid is free though. And other mpeg4 type codecs can be found free too. ffmpeg comes with the mpeg4 embedded in the program itself. (sh-weet!). www.ffmpeg.org - but it's a comman-line tool. I love it though, teaches you a thing or two about non-gui use of the computer, creating simple batch scripts (convert.bat) and such. And it has great quality controls.

There's also a bunch of good codec packs at www.free-codecs.com - including the XPcodecpack, which includes one of the many Xvid builds too (Koepi's I think)

Oh, and indeed DivX 7.2 is shown there, so that's probably free now ;-)  awesome.

ya never cease to learn  LOL

I think Quicktime has a compressor called 'Animation' which is lossless. But doesn't drastically reduce filesize. Unless you have just a few colors indeed, so the run-length encoding algorithm can pull a few tricks. If you render Poser in cartoon style against plain background it might be quite good.

I do agree that as long as you're looking at a working document, you should use a lossless compressor, or uncompressed. Also for another reason: be aware that some (many?) codecs put certain restriction on the content: such as color depth, bits per pixel, and most importantly width and height. Or even frame rate. Mpeg for example has only a few specific framerates. mpeg4 is better. But many also require that you use an even number of pixels in width and/or height. Or multiples of 4, 8 even.

Keep that in mind if you ever use a tool to select a rectangular area from your clip and crop to that. If you selected an odd or non-conforming size, saving to the AVI file later at that size might fail. Be sure to know the caveats of your chosen codec, or experiment a lot. And never toss away the uncompressed original. You can 7-zip it nicely, or use iceows which often gives better (and yet lossless)  compression than zip as it's wavelet based, like mpeg4 in some math ways.

Also, some video players may behave differenty: WIndows Media Player may fail to play a particular clip while another player might be more forgiving and play it nonetheless. SO be qell equipped with a choice of several players. SUch as Irfanview (which can also extract frames to BMP image sequnce), Media Player Classic (from the above-mentioned free-codecs site), Quicktime (I recommend getting Pro), .... again ffmpeg comes to mind too if you need to 'recover' a botched clip size and extract frames, perhacps not even all frames, perhaps only one every 20 rames or every 2 seconds... very powerful.

-Philip

www.thebest3d.com - beyond digital painting

The basic DivX codec is free; the encoding and translation program they have is not. But the codec works with every AVI tool I've ever used it with. It is true that if you buy the DivX Pro bundle, you get some upgrades to the codec which gives options for better quality or smaller compression. This is all as of version 7, which is current (www.divx.com).

I'm pretty sure the free codec does put a small, short-lived watermark in the corner of the video, though. I don't know if the Pro codec does; I've got it, but I don't use it as much as I used to.

That said, it's quite true and I fully agree that XVid is every bit as good, and is free all the way through.

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that there are some good articles about codecs and video compression in general at Wikipedia. I recall at one time getting lost a few times in the sea of jargon associated with video compression (multi-pass, bit rate, color depth, all that good stuff).
 

Thanks you guys!!!  That's some awesome very useful info.  Many thanks!!!

I am going to do some other research on my own at wikepedia but as far as when you finally get a good clip and you want to broadcast it on the internet.  The web site I post to when playing the animation it jerks even worse and doesn't play as smooth.  Does this have anything to do with the compression/codec?

kind regards

Quote - The web site I post to when playing the animation it jerks even worse and doesn't play as smooth.  Does this have anything to do with the compression/codec?

Could be... if you're sending the video to a host site (like YouTube or Vimeo) they are compressing what you send them, as well as probably converting it (usually to flash video, FLV instead of AVI or MOV). If you compressed the video first, and they re-compressed it, it's going to look worse than it did on your computer.

Most hosting sites have recommendations for how to prepare your video before you send it for best results. Look for a FAQ page at the hosting site, and you'll probably get some useful tips both in general and for that video host in particular.

Youtube may in fact do a few things. It may stream FLV in many cases, but some platforms may not take that, iPhone for example, so they prolly decide on the fly what to send you.

I did notice that Quicktime players can play .f4v files (Flash mpeg4 style). It's possible that youtube sends you .f4v now.

flv, f4v, mov (which means nothing unless you also state the compressor...), mp4, avi,... if you need to experiment, consider the free ffmpeg. All parameters (aurio rate, audio bitrate, frame rate, video bit rate, dimensions,,.....) everything at your fingertips - literlly. If you use it as commend line tool that is. I love using Norepad to edit my conversion scripts and try a few options quickly. Such as:

for %%q in ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 ) do (
  
    ffmpeg -i myrender.mov -s 320x240 -r 24 -b 500k -qscale %%q -f f4v myrender_%%q_toF4V

)

Put this in a file named convert.bat (not .txt) and double-click it to run this batch file.

And it's a very fast converter at that.

Thanks guys.  I have learned alot just from you guys input.  After some investigating, I used Modo to render my original animation and as I stated plays beautifully on the qt player so I'm not sure about the compression because in modo you have option to make mov or image sequence.  That was another question I have.  Is it best to render out a image sequence and then turn that into an animation?  If show is BMP the best format to render an image sequence in?  One of my programs only has the option to render out an image sequence.  And the site I uploaded this particular animation to does change to flash from what I can tell.  So the compression done by the program to get in mov and then the compression of the web site to flash really degraded the animation.  Here is a link for you to have a look to see.  Hope this info might be useful to others also.  Thanks again.

http://www.brickfish.com/Pages/VideosSeries/VideoView.aspx?qsi=16428044

Generally speaking, a sequence of images is better. If the program fails for some reason, you should have an option to pick up the rendering where it left off, saving time.

If you use image sequences, you want to make sure to use a format that doesn't lose data in the compression. That means that BMP is okay, and so is PNG, TGA, and TIFF. I like PNG best, myself, because it has really good compression with no loss of image data. For this purpose, you should stay away from GIF, because it doesn't have enough colors, and JPEG, because it loses some data and your animation will probably flicker.

Make sure that the program you use to assemble images will do one frame per rendered picture, so your timing is right.

I've never used Modo to render, but most programs I've used that can generate MOV files have an option stored somewhere for the codec to use; check the options and see what you can find. Probaby the most common MOV codecs are Animation and Sorenson, so you should see those as options in the list somewhere.

The animation looks good in terms of quality and brightness. It seemed a touch jerky from here, but I'm away from my normal connection and using a half DSL, so it's probably on my end. I'd love to see the animation do a little more, maybe some motion with the lettering or something; I think that's be fun.

Yes I would have like to have done more with it but only had a limited time frame to get it on and then I ran into alot of problems with the mov/windows movie maker problem.  I ended up having to save each frame out of image ready as a bmp to get it edited in windows movie maker.  I was going to let them know I used their moviemaker but man after that day I was so frustrated...this is hilarious,  I wished I had a mac.  I have never used one but everyone tells me they are better.  I have some other animations on that site where I moved the letters some.  I'm still experimenting with basic animation and really am leaning towards doing character animation for fun of course.  Thanks for taking a look and all your info. :)

I don't know if it's any better but you might want to try Corel Ulead Video Studio.  I got it as a package deal when I bought Corel's PaintShopPro Photo X2 but I haven't used it much as I got Adobe's PremierePro at about the same time, however I do use it now and then despite still having Premiere.

I know you can import still images - or a sequence of them - and create a movie from that, but I don't know much about compression etc

(this thread has been very interesting.)