Help, no .qt extension in render globals
 

Please help lol again. Ok so i want to render to .qt format, so i downloaded quicktime, instaled and restarted my machine. In the render globals when i come to selec the image format the .qt option is simply not there. Whats going on.

THanks again to anyone that can help.

Ben

I dont theik thers a quicktime option in maya???

Well when i used maya on Macs last college year, it had the option. An im quite sure it is there on the PC's in the lab at college we use Maya on now.

Theres not one on my PC, using maya 8.5 with windows.

It might be a Mac option forthe mac version???

The one thats left at the bottom of the pic is a Xpm file.

Then how am i supposed to render a movie that istn avi, and not have to render each frame as an image and import each one indavidual into premier or something, thats very long winded.

Indeed it is long winded, and that's rather a lifesaver. If something goes wrong during a render, and your computer crashes (or whatever) at frame 300/500, well, you don't have to worry about re-rendering the first 300 frames; they're already done. You only need to do the last 200.

If you're rendering an .avi, or something that "outputs" directly into a playable movie, and your computer crashes, you have nothing.

And while it get's a bit off topic, it helps with render layers as well; if you have a large scene, you can divide all the scene's contents into different render layers, and composite those. If you ever dislike something about a particular object/particle effect, you can make your tweaks, and only re-render THAT particular layer.

So aye, it is another "layer" of work, but it is handy...

Ok so what are my method options here, best image format to use for each frame and what software is quick and effect an easy to use? Sorry i have so many questions lol but ive had a Uni open day today and im all hyped and want to get learning to be on top when i start in september lol, learning 3Ds Max now aswell, my brians going to explode i think.

I don't know about best, but I use targa's (.tga).

As for a compositing program, I can't say I've used Premier, but After Effects works perfectly fine for my needs.

But feel free to post all the questions you have :p

Hmm well premier i no can load images as single frames shouldt be a problem then. Why .tga though? does this provide a high resolution image?

In all truth, I have personally never seen any difference between targa and .jpgs in terms of render time, resolution (appearence) or file size.

I use targas because, when I import them into After Effects, there's a little checkbox that quite simply says "Targa Sequence"...check that, and it imports my whole image range.

As I said before, I've never touched Premier, but I can't imagine a high-end compositing/movie-making program NOT having something so basic and useful like an import-image-range feature.

If you want, though, you can wait for other SM forum borwsers to come along and give you some more advice in image choices (.jpg versus .tga), if there is any.

Ok, well thanks ill take these points on board and geting experimenting with 24 or so frames and see where i end up. Thanks alot hope i can hel you out at some point in the furture, im sure i have some knowledge about something lol.

Thanks,

Ben.

Targa or tiff is used because they can be 24bit and have an alpha channel for masking , jpg does not have an alpha channel since it is only an 8 bit image.

tga, tiff, iff (there called a lossless compression file type) or bmp ( 100% uncompressed) are much better quallaty then jpegs . we were told in uni never render to jpegs for final stuff as they get really compressed. i also find bmp are very large files but by far the best quilaty as there is no compression on them.

In premire when you import a file there is a check box on the bottom saying image sequance.

I personally use iff when rendering which shake, digital fusion, photoshop (with pluggin) and after effects take but not premire. Then change them if i need to.

I also never render avi`s from maya, images all the way baby

Cheers thanks for the replys, going to get rendering tomoz, quite late where i am now lol 01:15am, i wish there was a cure for sleep jsut think what everyone could get done.

Just to clear things up.

There is really no need to go with bmp if you consider the amount of space it requiers. although tiff or targa are compressed, they are as stated above, lossless. and thats what they really are. their compression is RunLengthEncoded. So use them for final renders cause it saves much diskspace.


To jpeg is to say. stimes you can see a slider (likem in photoshop) where you can determine the amount of compression. but even if you set it to 100% its already not the same result as the original picture through to the different compression standard used by the JointPictureExpertGroup - known as jpeg.

to your original question. it doesn't matter what kind of container (avi or mov) you use the codec is important. avi is just the pc version to macs mov. and as long you didn't use a specific codec wwhich will result in compression they are the same.

what tweety says makes sense, too. cause if your render f***s up you have to render an whole movie file again. that is not what you wanna do after hours of rendering. with an image sequence you could start at the point where the render broke off.

and last but not least. if you order quicktime pro you can import image sequences and export as a video file. its a cheap solution. mckinley mentioned once a programm thats for free ... er.... videomach ithink it is. google it. its freeware as long you use it in a non-commercial way.

well thats it.

greets,
BadG3r