This is a frame from an 840x840 pixels 120-frame animation that I made yesterday. It is the first animation that I have made for some time. I have Poser 7. The image has these faults:-

(1) Low range of colors: his right shoulder shows this clearly.

(2) Coarse pixellation in color: see the shiny area on his chest, and the squared contours of the edges of the color areas caused by fault 1.

How can I cure these faults? I use the usual AVI animation rendering.

looks like color banding to me, probably 16-bit color (not per channel, I mean total). Did you save it as AVI file with one of the MS codecs?

 

Try the Lagarith codec, it's free, lossless, and makes great compression nonetheless, plus also can support Alpha and Null frames (I'd stay away from Nullframes though unless you've tested that all your other tools know how to handle them).

 

I'd be happy to convert it to Xvid (lossy) or Lagarith for you if you post the anim but chances are it's not going to recover, if indeed it is in 16bit now. Will probably have to re-render it and save to a better codec (same holds for Quicktime and Avi, any compressor), or save as image sequence such as 24-bit BMP or Png, Tiff or Targa.

-Philip

thebest3d.com - check the latest tutorials (you are here)

Please, where can I get Lagarith codec, and how do I install it and tell my Poser 7 about it? My Poser 7 asks me to choose between these compressors:-

Microsoft RLE

Microsoft Video 1

Intel IYUV Codec

Cinepak Codec by Radius

Div X 6.8 Codec (4 Logical C

Xvid MPEG-4 Codec

Helix YV12 YUV Codec

ffdshow Video Codec

Full Frames (Uncompressed)

And also, how do I get rid of the coarse pixellation effect like on the shiny area on his chest? (To get the image full size, right click on it and follow instructions.)

Please what are alpha frames and null frames?

I would try the xvid mpeg-4 codec and see what you get , you can render a small group of frames to see the quality.

Quote - I would try the xvid mpeg-4 codec and see what you get , you can render a small group of frames to see the quality.

 

Xvid is good for final output, but it's not lossless, you have to have a way to work without loosing quality, color, details etc... You have to use a lossless codec. Lagarith is good.

Lagarith is by Sir Lagsalot (I know, funny name).

You'll find it on leetcode:

 

http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

I have used it many times in Dogwaffle (PD Pro Howler) for animations and video work where I wasn't sure I was done and wanted to keep it lossless, yet small file size by comparison with uncompressed for sure, and also the speed of compression is great especially f you have a multicore system, such as my i7 8-core system. Even a tabletPC with 4-core Atom processor will like it.

But I have also seen one or two apps that seem to have trouble using Lagarith, I think Carrara 8 was one but I don't recall for sure.

 

When things move fast it may not matter to have lossless recording, so Xvid is definitely my other favorite and I use it a lot. I use it with very high quality high bandwidth and such so as to get very little loss and for my poor vision it turns out to be just fine. But be aware that there may be other side-effects. Try for example an animation of just a few frames, like 20 frames. Is the last frame good and is it even there? Be sure to check. If you do a long animation you can live without the last frame in most cases. If you do a hand-drawn animation or just a few key frame renders and you need each and every frame, you can't have the codec dump any frame.

Be also aware that most codecs usually have restrictions or requirements on the frame dimensions, such as the width and height must be even numbers, or multiples of 4, 8, 16 or more. Some even only work for very disctinct resolutions. You may be able to view an oddly dimensions clip in the tool that you created but it may not play right on other viewers, which may have more stringent implementation or limitation of feature support for some of the codecs. For example, in Dogwaffle I can create a clip, then use the rectangle marquee to select a portion and crop to that selection, in order to select a smaller portion of the video to keep and work with, and many times when doing so, one or both of width and height may be an odd value (such as 511x257) if I don't check. As long as I work with it in Dogwaffle, all is fine and I can save it native dwa format and it can reload it. But if I save it to AVI, in many (not all) codec cases the other players like WIndows Movie Player and such will not be able to display it right or even at all, as they can't handle odd dimensions.

 

Sidenote:

If you render long animations and don't render to image sequences, be aware that your AVI or other files can get very big. I had a file the other day that grew to bigger than 2 GB. Unfortunately none of my apps were able to re-open the file (not even Carrara where I had rendered it), even though they're 64-bit apps and they can address files much larger. But the hard drive was not formatted to a file system that allowed files larger than what 32-bits can handle. In theory that's 4 GB, and I should have been able to handle a 2.6 GB file, but that's in theory and in a perfect world.

If you use a 64-bit OS (WIndows 7 or others), you may want to use a file system that can handle it too. Or render to image sequences.

 

 

I

 

 

Quote -
  Please what are alpha frames and null frames?

 

Alpha channel: (not alpha frames). What I mean is that some codecs, including Lagarith, can render 8-bit alpha into the alpha channel, i.e. they don't just save 24-bit color (8bit per channel), when you enable the alpha channel. (it's usually one of the options in the codec settings). There are a few other codecs that support alpha. What you use it for can vary. In some cases, it carries transparency info (for the background to be transparent). In other cases it might be a value that identifies the object in the 3D scene (perhaps useful for masking or further post work where you want to apply some action to just certain pixels belonging to an object, for instance). Alpha can be used for whatever the application decides it wants to do with it. In most practical cases though, it means transparency.

 

Null frames: If you have a sequence of frames in which nothing at all changes and each pixel from a frame is identical to the pixels from the prior frame, you could simply have it remembered as a null frame. The codec could. If the codec is meant to detect that fact and remember it. What it thenh needs to do is know how long to hold that frame when playing back that null frame. Well, it's not the codec that needs that ability, it's the movie player. Some movie players and editors do know how to time it right and hold the current image the right amount of time when they see a null frame coming. Others don't. So be sure to test your entire production pipeline with all your tools before you start checking that option in Lagarith or other codecs that offers something like 'Use Null frames'. Otherwise you might find part sof the clip playing back at very odd durations.

 

 

 

Thanks. I rendered the first few frames and xvid mpeg-4 coding seems to work.

> Quote - Please, where can I get Lagarith codec, and how do I install it and tell my Poser 7 about it? My Poser 7 asks me to choose between these compressors:- > > Microsoft RLE > > Microsoft Video 1 > > Intel IYUV Codec > > Cinepak Codec by Radius > > Div X 6.8 Codec (4 Logical C > > Xvid MPEG-4 Codec > > Helix YV12 YUV Codec > > ffdshow Video Codec > > Full Frames (Uncompressed) > >  

 

If you install a new codec (such as Lagarith), it will become one of the choices when you render the animation to AVI. Below is an example with Poser 6 under Windows XP, chosing Lagarith as the codec and you can see some of the other options when clicking Configuration, including whether to use Null frames, and whether to render just the color (RGB - Default) or RGBA (RGB plus Alpha) or other choices.

Lagarith is derived or partly coded from the Huffyyuff codec. But it has been changed to be lossless and still reasonably fast, often faster than Huffyyuff, and provides decent file reduction (compression). When I think of Lagarith I like to think of an analogy with Iceows (formerly Arjfolder), a file compression tool (also free) similar to zip, 7z and others, but with wavelet technology and better compression for some types of files, yet lossless of course (for data it has to be :-)

 

 

 

 

Quote - ... If you install a new codec (such as Lagarith), it will become one of the choices when you render the animation to AVI. ... 

Thanks, but please:-

Where can I download Lagarith from?

How do install Lagarith i.e. what folder/directory to I put the codec files into? How do I tell my Poser where to look for my copy of Lagarith?

Google search.  :-)

Or read my second post above.  :-)

http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

wip?waiting for your animation.

Attached Link: http://larashots.com/appleyard/temp/mskbfit_04e.avi

> Quote - wip?waiting for your animation.

I used Xvid MPEG-4 Codec.

The end bit is after he shot the cameraman.