Render to AVI: incomplete file

[billybong001]

Good day guys,

I am facing a slight issue with Max 2011 rendering out a 500 frame animation. It renders out normally, no errors messages or whatever. Render settings like so:

However the output file only shows about half of my animation. How can I fix this please? I have already tried both "active time segment" and manual range.

Bill

[Steve_Curley · Accepted solution]

Rule1. NEVER render directly to avi. Always render to an image sequence (png, tif, tga - not jpeg because it's lossy).
Could well be the CODEC you chose. Certain CODECs only support specific resolutions and will silently fail when presented with an invalid resolution. Try different ones, or render to images and use something else to convert them to avi (after effects, virtualdub etc). Also check the obvious like having enough free disk space, the resulting avi not exceeding the 4GB filesize limit (on older and/or 32bit OSs) and so on.

[billybong001]

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your advice. I rendered as png sequence and imported it into AE which then rendered a H.264 video. Entire process was quick and only involved remarkably small file sizes. Given you a thumbs up.

Cheerio,

Bill

[Steve_Curley]

Glad it helped 🙂

[Rob_J_]

Rendering to individual files is always the best option.  Because it is not a matter of "If" your render will error out, but "when".  Rendering individual frames allows you to resume redering where it left off using "skip existing images".  I used to get frustrated all the time rendering to an AVI and have it error out at 98% only to have to start all over again.  Not only that but if there are glitches in your renders, you can simply re-render the individual corrupt frames instead of having to process all 500 again.