Rendering Scene Animation - Size?
 

Hello!

I am planning to render a 200 frames long scene of my Stargate and wanted the video to be in a high resolution (1024*768)... See ">Stargate<" in WIP section for project description...

I am worried about the size that video will be. Maya's videos are uncompressed first I think, and I've done a couple of videos in much lower resolution that got nearly 500MB for only about the same lenght?..

My Hard-Drive where Maya4.5 is installed has around 3 GB free space, my other partition about 5 GB, but I could clean that one up a bit...

Is there any way to render and compress the video at the same time? Or maybe I should render to single jpg's?

Best Regards

Markuz

Batch render it in parts. ie, batch render the first 50 frames, then compress them, then do another 50 and compress them and add them to the first lot, etc etc

That seems to make sense.

Yet I would render single images and then mount them in AfterEffects. Compressing the video in parts might show artifacts at the start and end frames. Better to compress the whole video after the procedure.

mhh... Rendering in parts would be a nice idea in every usual situation, but the problem is that it's going to take a waaayy looong time to render, and I will be on holiday for 7 days, so what I am looking for is a procedure to produce the whole video in one step ;)

How can I easily produce an video in after effects of several images? Is there an easy quick way to do so, or do I have to kexframe every single still somehow? I am still now very familiar with After Effects :( ...

Best Regards and Thanx for help :)

Markuz

Render to Tif's or Tga's and put em together in a video proggie like Premier, render it out with the compression of your choice.

i would just render it, your finished movie willl have about 900 MB ... so it´s fine with your space...

i calculated with my alst movie, 280 frames, 320*240 went out to be ~ 100MB ... so, 1024 is about 3 times larger, so 100 MB * 3 ... and 768 is again about 3 times larger than 240, so 300 MB * 3 = 900 MB ...

Hello!

That sounds quite logical! So I think I have enough space on my drive?
Thanks for all your help, I'll now render it in a single 1024*768 movie :)

Best Regards

Markuz

if you want high quality, I'd recomend rendering tga files and putting them together at the end. The free Render Globals vid we have here goes over that process with a freebie program.

@mtmckinley

Thank you very much for that hint! I just watched the movie and immediately downloaded the program you used called VideoMach, so I am going to render it frame-wise...

I only fear that my memory will not be sufficent... It's very close every time with each single image, I have to restart Maya before every frame-render with all details to not get an error message "free memory is low"... Will it work anyway, maybe Maya will empty the memory after each and every rendered frame?

Hop so :D

Best Regards

Markuz

well, with this kind of computer work, a fairly good bit of RAM is pretty much required.

Of course, but I though 640 MB would be enough ... Well, I have to upgrade my PC anyway, my 800MHz CPU is quite slow ;)

1024*768*4 (for 4 channels, 8 bits or 1 byte each) * 200 / 1024 (for Kbytes) / 1024 (for Mbytes) = 600 Mbytes of raw data.

Nice call fredrikkson!
I think maya's renderer dumps your RAM after each frame... and I KNOW mental ray does...

good luck.