Hey, folks -- I'm working on an animation in RDS. It's of a large spaceship with lots of tiny, illuminated windows. When I render the animation with subtle motion (like a slow dolly toward the ship), the smallest windows wink on and off. Also, nearly horizontal lines tend to "shimmer," as do nearly vertical lines. It seems to be similar to an anti-aliasing problem, but I'm pretty sure that it's a result of the scan-lines in NTSC video. I'm rendering with Adaptive Oversampling at best, smart sampling and lighting smart sampling off, and with field rendering enabled (I've tried both with field rendering on and off). I can see the effect when I single-frame walk through the rendered animation within RayDream, so I'm sure it's not an effect of the output-to-NTSC modules I'm using. Does anyone know (or even have any good guesses)what I can do do eliminate these effects? I have at my disposal RayDream Studio 5.5, Adobe Premiere LE 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.0 (full version), and Adobe After Effects 3.1.1 (not the production bundle). Any help will be MOST appreciated. Thanks! Dex

Are you sure this is not a field/frame issue? If you go look at AE forums they are just filled with people asking how to get that part correct. The first thing you need to do is figure out how to import into priemere. Does your version of premiere take odd first or even? Go look in your premiere manual. Find out the exact screen size/dpi/field order that your codex uses. This part has to be correct. Ideally with carrara (and raydream I assume) you then just render the animation with that info and you use the premiere editing codex. I am assuming that the animation is rendered tho and you dont want to do that. What I would do is import the animation into aftereffects and open a new comp. Make the comp the exact screen size that premiere wants, drag in your animation, scale it to fit the screen. Then make the movie in AE but where it says use best settings, click on that. Turn on the field render and set the render to whatever you need (odd/even) Then click on the output module and select .avi or .qt but make sure you go into options and select the primere codec. Render out the animation..this should go quick..its not doing anything but resizing and re encoding. you may also want to apply a small fast blur effect here just to soften it up..but first try it regular..a lot of time just putting your animation into the correct format fixes everything. But buy blurring things you make it take more than one pixel so it covers up the shimming. Lastly after the comp is rendered go into preiemere...import the animation...I dont know aobut priemere but in avid you can tell it to select odd/even/none field order and have it resize etc..make sure these settings are correct in your editor import option. Hopefully that will help? What I have been doing is rendering in Carrara w/o field support and rending to a photoshop sequence with no compression. then I import that sequence into after effects, resize and render into the Avid Codex that I need. The nice thing about having AE and the animation in a format that isnt compressed is that when you move onto a new editor you can have your source archived digitally w/o having to pull it from a tape. So is this to much info? NOt enough info? Wrong info? Id spell check it but Im off to help my buddy out this weekend so I have to scatt...let me know if you need anything clarified tho.

upon quickly re reading your question...heres the summerized version: turn off field rendering...use after effects to break up the frames into fields. Thats what I have ended up doing with carrara also. I'll keep up the long version just incase tho :)

Thanks, Brent -- I've tried variations on what you're suggesting, but not exactly your idea; I can see that I'll be spending a weekend of trial and error. Yes, there's an animation rendered, but I'm just in testing phase -- I was worried that something like this might come up.... I'm afraid this might be a limitation of RayDream's rendering engine -- maybe I'll try the other renderers -- hybrid, non - 5.5 raytracer, those things.... If I come up with a solution I'll let you know. And thanks for the input. And, of course, if anyone else has any ideas, please post them.... I'm trying everything I can think of.... - Dex

I've had some problems before with some jiggling stars on a starfield once . The solution was to apply gaussian filtering to the texture . Do you have that option in Raydream ? If your little windows are not generated by a texture, then it won't resolve the problem anyway . litst

I was thinking about your prob this weekend. I remembered on the yahoo groups list that some editor from espn was complaining about the field render errors that Carrara was creating in the rendering process. When I first rendered my car commercial last year there was a lot of flutter b/c I used Carraras field render. I think that the field render sucks in Carrara & Raydream from what I read. I am pretty sure the best way to do what you want is to render it into an uncompressed pict sequence (.pict, .tiff, .psd) and then use aftereffects to output it in the correct size/resolution/dpi etc that premiere requires. There are 2 many factors that the carrara/raydream engine doesnt take into account..pal/ntsc, square/non-square, etc.

Hey, folks. Thanks again for all the replies. Yep, I've come to the same conclusion -- field rendering is a bit ugly in RDS.... However, I still haven't solved my problem.... I'm still working on it. I'll give the uncompressed sequenced images a try; haven't figured how to get them into the composition in AE as one movie, though, without dragging each one on individually (kind of tedious with a ten second animation). Any suggestions?

Well its been a year since I have used 3.1 but you can select to import the animation sequence as one image and AE will put it together for you...then you dont have to put them in one frame at a time. Are you on a mac or a pc? I can find out the sequence...I think we still have some macs with AE 3.1 on it around here. I think you just select the first frame helloXXX.psd and then select an option that says import as sequence or something and it will find them and import them as one .mov it might not be in the import file command..it might be in the prefrences. AE 3.1 had a piss poor interface...4.1 and 5.0 are like new programs b/c of the more user friendly interface. Worse case scenerio I'll email you my # and well figure out. I know you can do it, its a pain to figure out the templete, but once its done its no problem anymore.

Thanks, Brent. I'm on a PC with 3.1. And you're right; it's an option to import the sequence. That said, though, the problem appears in sequenced .psd files. It's in the original render from RayDream. Even if I step through the animation one frame at a time in RDS, it shimmers like a Phoenix street in August heat. (Or October heat, for that matter -- it's hot as hell here.) I'm trying a render at a whopping double size right now (1480 x 960 x 30FPS) to see if a gaus blur and a reduction to 720 x 480 will fix the problem.... Next test will be to build the model with practical windows -- maybe it's the shaders dancing around.... Otherwise, I may be needing to jump to Max or something....

GraphicsConverter (shareware) can compile sequential images (over 90 different file formats) into any number of animation formats with various compression schemes. It will output a movie as Animation, BMP, Cinpak, Component Video, DV NTSC/PAL, Intel Video/Raw, Motion JPEG A&B, Planner RGB, PNG, Sorenson, TGA, TIFF, and Video. You just need to use the "Convert" option from the "File" menu. Then find the images & select all of them. Then just hit the radio buttons to fill-in your file formats & compression, frames pr sec, color depth etc. One caveat, GraphicsConverter is MAC OS only so if you know someone with a MAC you'r in business, Or, have your work buy one for you!

Well that sucks about the shimmering. I was assuming that the whole field/frame thing was the problem...if going to a .psd sequence still has the shimmer then you are screwed. fyi: I know with Carrara if you use post render effects that you get those types of shimmies. The post render only effects each frame...it doesnt take the whole animation into account. So if you use motion blur or depth of field and try to render an animation you are screwed. You have to manually add those effects in after effects. Auroua looks to be the only post render filter that doesnt screw up to badly, but it has massive problems with clipping that are only apparent when animating. If you think you will need to try a different program I would suggest you steer away from truespace & animation master. I am still thinking about buying one of those programs but they are lacking big time for broadcast support. They mess up simple things like matte's so its worthless trying to use it for broadcast. Carrara is lacking a lot but it at least lets me key consistantly :) Well good luck and let us know what your solution is.

Well, it seems that the problem was, in fact, in the shaders. There was bump info, glow info, reflection info, and all sorts of stuff. I guess it was just too much for RDS to handle and keep the images smooth through an animation. So, I've rebuilt the model (significant design change, in the process), and rebuilt the shaders to be vastly simpler. Seems to be fine, now. Little, if any shimmer. And if there's shimmer in a shot, I'll change the design of the shot. (Fine since I'm just doing this project for fun; if this were something pro, I'd be looking for another solution....) Thanks again to everyone for their advice. I really appreciate it. Dex

I dont know if you remember or not but a few months ago I was asking about a render problem with a model of the earth..Carrara kept leaving little black holes in the model. I came to the same conclusion...I had to dump the cellular shader in the bump channel and get rid of a cloud primitive. Looks like some of the info has problems working well with each other. Sometimes I am tempted to learn lightwave or max, but have you ever seen how hard it is just to put in some text? What a pain. I think Carrara is my fav b/c I am so lazy :) I dont know what I am going to do when clients realize that spinning there logo/name over a quickie landscape I made with 4 winds requires little to no work! Well congrads on figuring out your animation...post up some samples when its done :)

Just rendered it out last night -- I'll try to make an MPEG or something so y'all can see what I've been qvetching about..... I just got a new computer and am testing it out; man it renders FAST! I started out using Lightwave at the Public Access station in Tucson, Az about a decade ago. I'd guess it's made a few changes since then, but it is tempting....