Hi :o)

Okay,,, dumb questions;

How long should a person wait after uploading an animation at Renderosity before you inquire if there is anything wrong ?

I have been rendering my animations @ 1920 x 1080 png as I assumed it to be somewhat universal.  Is that  generally the rule?

Any other tips or  ideas that you can think of  for new peeps that i can include on my animation up load thread?

ok 1920x1080 as png.... omg that's huge even if only for a 10 second anim at 30 fps. You're talking 300 images in PNG format at 1920x1080 each, have you seen the size of that? You're not going to want to upload that. You can render at that size if your computer doesn't mind, but sharing and showing needs to be in reason  lol... put the image sequence into a WMV or mp4 or AVI with a decent algorithm for good compression (at least 50:1 ratio) without too much loss of detail, in fact for AVI there's a free codec called Lagarith, I use that one because not only is it well compressed and fast to do so, it' is in fact lossless.

PNG as an image sequence is good because it's lossless, so it's good when that matters. Not so good when size and time maters for uploading. Although there are some scenarios where PNG will excell with regards to compression ratio, such as with run-length scenarios, similar to when Gifs do well, you know, when there's only a few colors and many consecutive pixels at the same color, not every other pixel a different color.  In the latter case, PNG can be sure. SO if you render something with a lot of color noise, such as  grass, where every helm of grass makes the colors of nearby pixels quickly change from light to dark to shaded to highlight grey and green and flowers etc... it's noisy and thus png doesn't compress well, and files are big.

That said, I don't think I answered your question - sorry it's too early and the caffeine is just setting in.

-Philip

let's waffle and howl - pd howler 1.0 is here to help

Hi Philip,

Not only have I seen the size of that, I have been useing this resolution for over a year.

on a half dozen projects three of them being 4minutes + in length.

Well, with nothing to go by my reasoning is that my tv is 1900X 1080 as well as my monitor that I am useing right now. This seems to be the standard consumer resolution of the day so for the best result this seems to be a minimum

      I think that the new Blender animation was rendered at 7600 x 4320!

Rick

7600 x 4320  now that's what I'm talking about LOL... not consumer... this is film grade.

or close enough.

 How long is your movie?

(Seconds, frames per second?)

Philip,

LOL

I have one in Features/Animation @ Renderosity " Zombie Awareness" that is about a minute or so. I have done three that are over 4 minutes. All at 30fps.

P.S. what resolution do you use?

where can I see one of your films?

ok, let's see, 4 minutes, i.e. 240 seconds times 30 that's 7200 frames, if you save them as image sequence, there's no cross-frame compression, each frame compressed on its own, PNG might yield 1 MB per frame at 1920x1080, or thereabouts, it could be less and it could be more, but on average I'd expect about 1 MB per frame. right? That's of you use the highest quality in PNG, because what's the point in doing individual lossless PNG sequence unless you want it at highest quality?

Times 7200 you'll need about 7 GB to store the sequence as PNG. PErhaps 2-3 GB if you're lucky.

I'd go with a movie format with a codec that doesn't just compress each frame in itself but also looks ahead to next frames and records what's changing only, or a hybrid of that, and that's where the divx and mpeg4 and similar codecs often give you better compression.... and if you could find one that does basically that (wavelet based) and then keeps it lossless nonetheless, you've got Lagarith codec for Avi, free. So if it's not the final output, i.e. if you still might need the original pixels of each frame accessible untouched, Lagarith codec is a good choice. REasonable file compression, no loss.

I do some of my screen captures or video work at 720p (1280x720). I haven't done 3D rendered animations at higher than that. If you just want to show something on youtube to entertain, 720p is more than sufficient, espeically if you're hoping to address a crowd of consumers on iPads and smartphones. The initial streaming from youtube won't be at 720p, that's an option you can choose but it will probably start at 270p or 360p, (although you can force it higher with appropriate flags in the url or embed code).

You can see some of my videos at www.youtube.com/staigerman  and www.youtube.com/pdhowler

A few more (embedded from youtube for the most part) are shown here too:

http://thebest3d.com/howler/tutorials/newVids/

Note that the embed code isn't showing them at 1280x720... only a few people will take the time to wait for that download to start streaming at the top res.

In other words: It's great to have 1920x1080 or higher versions of the renderings, in case you need them to be shown at that res. But don't be surprised if it takes an eternity to render, let alone to upload :-) .... uploading is usually 1/10th the speed of downloading, with most cable providers, or so I've heard.

In your initial post, you didn't say how long it looked like it was going to take for the upload. Where were you uploading to, Renderoity? IS there a size limit? What's the size of your image sequence?

Philip,

I got a 1tb internal hard drive just for the purpose of poser renders.

I use Vegas movie studio for editing and render to AVI or Mov files, which ever gives the highest resolution for the upload or dvd or whatever.  For youtube i only need to click once in a drop down menu and it uploads it for me automatically, (high rez):o)

The size limit is 50 megs here at renderosity, so; I just look at what ever codec that will yeild the highest resolution at that limit or below. takes 5-10 minutes.

WOW!

I checked out your videos, nice tutorials and SO many!!!

Looks like a great program you are useing, I will have to check it out once I am more proficient at  the programs I am useing LOL.  (That should take some time).

1280 x 720 sounds like a resonable and useful resolution. 

what kinds of animations do you do in 3D?

The one that I have uploaded here at renderosity is my version of the older horror flick trailer.  I have another pending that is my version of a modern horror flick trailer and yet another pending that is a 4 minute+ music video that happens to be my first animation and can be viewed at youtube.

    At renderosity , click features, select animations and you should see the thumbnail for ZOMBIE AWARENESS :o)

If you're hitting the limit of file size too easily I'd recommend hosting it on youtube and simply embedding or linking to it in your announcements, at least for the very very large and high res versions

Philip,

Yes, that works, but; what is just as effective is to download the mp4 version from myvideos at youtube and upload it to renderosity.  My 4 minute music animation came in under the 50 meg limit and shows at the same rez as the tube:o)  So, one could do both.

    Where;s anouncements? LOL

correct, you can re-download a flick that you had on youtube already. you can also use online tools like youtubedownloader or keepvid to grab someone-else's video from youtube back to your computer and save as mp4. In most cases the highest available version will be offered. Keepvid gives choices, in case you don't care for the 1080p version for example, or if you only want the audio track as an mp3

If you prefer to just do the conversion yourself you can use the free WinFF (powered by ffmpeg).

Well standard animations format applies. Considering it's for web deployment maybe you should go no larger than 720p since many people still use slow connections.

I'm the one that approves them, BTW, and sorry for not checking them out already. Job is killing me :(

I'll do it tomorrow, I promise!

Compression does magic. I recorded a video of my daughter's highschool graduation yesterday, the camera gave me a 1280x720 Quicktime .MOV file of 500 MB approximately for around 2+ minutes of footage. There's a lot of darkness in that particular shot, except when she's walking across the stage but because of the otherwise dark areas there's a lot of graininess, and hence pixel noise, and at high bitrate or quality that results in a very large file no matter what compressor you use if you want to keep track of all or most changing pixels. So I reduced it to 640x360 to get a bit of color averaging between 2x2 neighboring pixels, and also made the whole thing brighter and higher contrast, and got rid of much of the noise. The size is now about  7 MB using H.264 codec  in a .MP4 or .MOV file.

Hi  nemirc :o)

I love your DOGMA avitar LOL!

Please excuse my ignorance but,,,,

What is the standard animation format?

Why would a lower resolution pnp image file be better than a higher resolution image for animation?

I understand that job stuff, I did'nt take it personal :o)

It took over a year for me to find where and how to upload to the animation department,  and I found that there are people that have been here far longer than I that  also had no idea. 

That said, when it took 3 weeks for my first animation to get posted, I wondered if I had done something wrong. 

The others were there for a week when I inquired how long does it take to get posted.

Hi Philip,

I hear you :o)

Compression sometimes helps :o)

Hi there, when I said standard formats I was more thinking of frame formats, like NTSC, 640x480, 720p or 1080p. I think I should have been more clear.

As staigermanus said, compression helps a lot, and actually using .mp4 is us my first option when it comes to deploying video.

Quote - Philip,

I got a 1tb internal hard drive just for the purpose of poser renders.

I use Vegas movie studio for editing and render to AVI or Mov files, which ever gives the highest resolution for the upload or dvd or whatever.  For youtube i only need to click once in a drop down menu and it uploads it for me automatically, (high rez):o)

The size limit is 50 megs here at renderosity, so; I just look at what ever codec that will yeild the highest resolution at that limit or below. takes 5-10 minutes.

Vegas movie studio by Sony, wonderful program!!!  I use it myself, you render and edit just about any format, I love it!!!  I need to upgrade again soon. One of my favorite features in the program is the video overlay, allowing you to compose complex animated scenes with .png layering! For example, a battle with 100's of knights on horseback, 100's of archers, catapults, etc. 

Hi Snow :o)

I have not been able to get the video overlay to work. :o(  I must be missing a step?

Quote - Hi Snow :o)

I have not been able to get the video overlay to work. :o(  I must be missing a step?

What do you use for media in the video overlay track?  I use a .png image series and it works fine!! B) Just make sure the track is set to Alpha composite mode. Blessings