I've made a simple animation in 3ds Max and rendered each individual frame as a PNG. I'm trying to determine the best way to get those frames into Adobe Premiere as a video. So far, I've tried the following:
My question is: what technique do you use to go from hundreds or thousands of frames to your video editor of choice? Is using a RAID and importing the raw image sequence the only professional-grade option? Are there programs other than MEncoder that can concatenate individual frames into a video and save the result using a codec mainstream video-editing software is more comfortable with?
Any suggestions or comments are appreciated!
Addendum: for reference, here's my MEncoder command (note that it must be run in the directory containing the images).
"C:\Location of MEncoder if it is not on the path\mencoder" mf://*.png -mf fps=60:type=png -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=5000:mbd=2:v4mv:trell:mv0 -oac copy -o output.avi
Our workflow is to use Adobe After Effects to compile our PNG sequences into uncompressed AVI files. In AE, we'll layer all of our passes and handle the color correction and other effects. Premiere is used for adding titles and logos, and compiling the individual uncompressed sequences into the final video.
We have a dedicated machine connected to an external RAID via SAS connection for speed. For the most part, we can play in real time from the drive.
Chris Medeck
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Reign,
I would always render to indivual frames and bring those into Premiere. You didn't list the specs of your computer or the version of Premiere you are using. There are a lot of preferences to set in Premiere to get the best performance from the software, such as memory usage and Cache settings / locations, and the specifics of the timeline that you setup for your project. If you have a CUDA capable Nvidia card, make sure you have Premiere configured to use the card. You should also make sure that your Preview window is set to 1/2 or 1/4 resolution to improve playback. H264 is really a final delivery codec and not a good codec choice to use for editing. You don't necessarily need RAID for editing, a good 10000rpm or 15000rpm platter drive or adequately sized SSD work very well.
Good luck,
Jeff
You slow performance is likely more related to your graphics card than your hard drive, at least where Adobe is concerned. Adobe uses a fat allocation of RAM and disk space to cache what's on your screen. If you are paging back and forth to the local drive to both access source material AND save to cache, then you are really working that drive. Try maximizing you scratch disk settings and percentage of RAM in the preferences of the Adobe app. We have also found that it is best to reboot between shifting from say any other app and Premiere or AE and vise versa. It's the only way to dispel the huge RAM grab that Adobe nabs. You can also try purging the cache from the application, but we find that doesn't really do the whole trick.
To improve even more, upgrade to a card that has GPUs and multiple CUDA cores (and fairly large RAM) This unloads all the on screen activity to the graphics card and off your local disk drive. You should see a remarkable improvement. the Nvidia Quadro line is what we have in our Boxx Technologies workstations. Very happy with them.
Anyway, that said, you can also use the Video Post function along with multiple render passes to generate both a beauty and an alpha stream. Or take the beauty pass of PNGs and Video Post those into a Quicktime with Animation codec which will preserve the alpha.
That can be done in a script that you can set to run when you are done for the day so that it's ready the next morning.
I hope this helps
Thank you all for your suggestions.
First off, I did indeed neglect to provide my specs. I'm using 3ds Max 2012 and Adobe Premiere CS5. My hardware:
i5-3570 at 3.4 GHz
16 GB of RAM
Windows 7 Professional
AMD Radeon HD 7850 (actually a decent card, but not much use to Premiere)
The hard drive on which the source files reside is a Western Digital "Black" drive (7200 RPM and I rather doubt I even get that most of the time).
I've tried making an uncompressed AVI out of the individual frames (albeit using MEncoder rather than After Effects, which I don't own), but Premiere lags badly with large uncompressed AVI files, too (although it doesn't lock up). I'm not particularly keen on large intermediate files, either. However, you can't argue with the quality.
My video card isn't an Nvidia one, so Premiere's CUDA-based speed improvements aren't available to me. However, according to an Adobe employee (SteveHoeg, about 7/8 of the way down the page), "GPU acceleration does not aid in decoding footage, so if you cannot play an image sequence in realtime on it's own, a faster GPU is unlikely to help you." However, I don't doubt that a CUDA card would probably help, even if it didn't do so directly.
At the current time, I can't really justify investing in new hardware just for this (I rarely use 3ds Max to export animation for videos; I think this may be the first time), although the next time I'm upgrading I'll definitely consider a solid-state drive and possibly an Nvidia card that supports CUDA. However, I'll look into Premiere's memory and cache settings and hopefully I can eke out enough of an improvement to import the image sequence directly.
Thanks again for your help!