Maya and avi's
 

Hi all,
i've been using Maya for about 2 years now and love it to bits however, there is still one thing that gets me slightly annoyed. This being the inability to render out to any usable avi format, now i know when it comes to final rendering only a fool would render out to an avi but it would be real handy to be able to check my fully rendered tests without having to open premiere and compile an avi. Does anybody know if there is a script or plugin out there that could do this, maybe something like a post render mel that would compress your avi with the codec of your choise?

Anyway just curious :)

Thx.

so you want to see a quick render? I'm not sure that's possible. There is the playblast feature, which lets you do an avi with what's in your scene.

It almost sounds like you're asking how to render, but not fully render, and I'm not sure if there's such thing.

not quite :)
 

hey mtmckinley,

Thx for the reply, i don't think you quite understood me though, as you probably know maya can render directly to avi but without any compression, so you end up with a massive file even for relativley short clips. The only way around this is to render out to stills then stick-em together in premiere with whatever codec takes your fancy, why not use the playblast you say? Well the playblast is great for checking your timing and posing etc but it doesn't have any of the lighting or texturing of your models, so a fully rendered image would be needed which is when you'd have to render stills, open premiere and stick-em together. I'm probably just being a bit too picky, I just remembered it being quite useful when i used to use Max.
Thanks anyway :)

They probably feel that most folks are going to be compositing in another app. Personally, I prefer bringing stills into premiere or after effects as it gives me more control over the final product but I can see your point. Maya's avi output isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I could definitely see the value in the ability of Maya to render AVI's out using a CODEC. It would be great for WIP demos when you need to render compressed animations of a higher quality than Playblast but without the hassle of going through the composition step.

maybe it's just me, but I don't necessarily find importing a tga sequance > save as an avi all that time consuming. :shrug:

But it's not quite that simple is it? Here's the steps as far as I can tell:

(1) Batch render out your targa files (long wait for big animations)
(2) Open another app
(3) Load in the targa files
(4) Set up your output options
(5) Render out the compressed animation (also long wait for big animations)
(6) Open windows explorer and clean up all the TGA files (and the alpha channel files).

Ade's solution would be nice:
(1) Set up render globals for a compressed AVI
(2) Render (long wait for big animations)

As far I see it, quite a bit of time could be saved.

guess it just depends on the situation. From my personal experience, I've not noticed any sort of big time hit or frustration. Others, I'm sure, have different views.

Im fine with the loading into another program, problem is some of those other programs cost a fortune, and the free counterparts just dont have the options. I think if there was a built in avi setup that had many options and the such, we would see more animations on the site. And short clips.

good point twisteddragon33,

I use all my software at uni so purchasing programs is not an issue, maybe maya 6 will have the answer?