Hello,
Rendering to avi is not bad, but as you have indicated might encounter many problems (such as codec failures, framerate mismatch etc...)
A better work-flow is to render the animation into images (preferably tiff format or tga format) and then use post-processing tools such as Combustion or AfterEffects etc... to combine the generated images to an animation movie you like. This is the typical professional workflow and offers you more control over your final sequence. (For example, if you would like to overlay your animation over a static 2D background then you can do that very easily with those post-processing tools. Please refer to any "Multipass Rendering" topic for more details on it)
In case you are not much interested in the post-processing or do not have access to those post-processing software, you can still use any good video editing tool to combine the generated images into a movie. The advantage is, you do not need to re-render the whole animation if you would just like to, say change the compression mode, or say change the frame-rate. You can just use your image sequence and re-create the video with your new codec settings or frame-rate settings.
Vegas Pro, ULead Movie Studio etc... are professional video editing software that let you create movies out of your image sequences. There are many free editing tools available too, such as Avid Free or Windows Movie Maker (Please check listings such as
http://tv.isg.si/site/?q=node/873 or
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/free-video-editing-software-for.html ). Of course, if you would like to get creative you can roll out your own custom animation creation application with my C++ movie creation library (
http://www.geocities.com/krishnapg/createmovie.html ). The advantage with these tools is, we can concentrate on the "movie" part without bothering about Maya rendering times. We can test create the video (from our Maya generated images) with one codec and see the size and quality, change the codec or framerate and re-create the video and check it again for quality and so on. This is especially useful, if you would like to target for multiple types of audience, such as if you are planning to distribute your video over web you can create one movie with low bit-rate and then you can create another hi-fi version with high bitrate for off-line play. All without costing precious Maya's rendering times (especially if your scene keeps growing in complexity, costing more rendering time).
The way you can generate image sequence from Maya is, once again by using the Render Settings. Follow the below steps as usual:
1. From the Window Menu, click Rendering Editors | Render Settings
2. In the Common Tab, for the
Frame/Animation ext: entry select "name.#.ext" This determines the filename format of the output image sequence. You can select others also, such as
name.ext.# But leaving the extension in the end makes the OS recognize the file-type.
3. For the
Image Format Entry, select either "Tiff16" or "Targa". These are the most compatible formats for many video editors (and support some special channels that you might later find useful if you move into Multipass Rendering)
4. For the
Start Frame entry, select the animation frame start, and for the
End Frame entry specify the animation end frame. This is the frame range that will be rendered as image sequence. Usually you can leave the
By Frame value to be 1
5. For the
Frame padding entry, select a value 3 or 4. This will decide the number width for the output filename. (As you keep changing the
Frame padding entry, the FileName preview keeps changing on the top, near the
Common Tab header. You can use a value that gives enough range for all your frame numbers to fit in.)
6. In the
Image Size section, select a reasonable size for your output frame. You can use the
Presets combo to select one of the presets.
7. Once you are done with the settings, please double check the
Path,
FileName,
To and
Image Size label values displayed immediately under the
Common Tab header. These are your settings that will be used for the Rendering. Ensure that your path is valid and that you have permissions to create and write output images for that path.
8. Close the Render settings window and use the Render | Batch Render option to start the rendering. Once it is finished, you can find your images in the path you have noticed in the Render Settings.
You can quickly check your animation with the FCheck.exe (available in the Maya/bin directory).
1. Start FCheck.exe
2. Use the File | Open Animation option and select the first image in your sequence. Typically it will have name like,
FileName.0001.tga 3. Once you click the Open button, FCheck will automatically load all the rest of the images in the sequence and will start playing for you as an animation sequence. (In the first pass it might be little bit slow, but later on it will keep up with the speed). Try adjusting the FPS entry and have fun.
All the best.
P.Gopalakrishna
http://www.geocities.com/krishnapg/
