Joel Parrish Posted February 13, 2003 Share Posted February 13, 2003 One quick question: How can you export a high quality AVI animation from IRONCAD? Every setting I have made results in the same blurring of parts and edges after the first frame. Is it the included codecs that are available in IC? An animated GIF gives me the best resolution, but using it results in poor playback framerate. I suppose I could use a screen capture program. But it would be nice if I could simply export a high quality AVI. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 13, 2003 Share Posted February 13, 2003 The absolute best way to export an animation is to export it as high res, uncompressed .png's, and then compile those .png's into an animation using a 3rd party app such as Adobe Image Ready. As for using the AVI format from IronCAD, I don't recall seeing a blurring problem, although I haven't exported an AVI in several months. I do recall that you have to play with the compressor type to get the desired results on occasion. It could also be a graphics card issue I suppose. OHHH It could also be that you're setting an image size that is not the same as your viewport window size. Doing this can mess up the resulting avi also. Try "unmaximizing?" your viewport, then resize the viewport to your desired avi size. Then when you export the AVI, type in the "exact" dimension that are listed for the view size in the bottom right of the IronCAD window. By doing this, IronCAD exports at a 1:1 ratio so it doesn't have to try to compress or stretch the image, thus improving your chances of a higher image quality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Parrish Posted February 13, 2003 Author Share Posted February 13, 2003 Chris, The PNG style is working. I just have 5700 frames of animation. It's going to be a long day. Good thing I have lots of disk space. The AVI exact screen size trick didn't help. I'm still getting blurred and choppy frames after the first frame. Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 13, 2003 Share Posted February 13, 2003 Could you email the scene to me, and detail exactly which options you chose in the avi export, so that I can export the avi here and see if my graphics card makes any difference? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mpawlak Posted February 13, 2003 Share Posted February 13, 2003 Joel, have you tried each compressor type to no avail? Choosing the right compressor was the solution to my blurry (compressy-looking) problem awhile back. Don't remember which one worked best though... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Parrish Posted February 14, 2003 Author Share Posted February 14, 2003 Chris, I'd love to email you the AVI but a full export is about 780meg... I've found that if I stop it part way thru it's resolution is much worse... mpawlak, I've tried all the compressor types... It's interesting, sometimes the Cinepak works well at about 500 dpi... And sometimes the Video1 works better at 300dpi but creates a file size 3x the Cinepak @ 500dpi... It seems to really depend on the background color and the number of visible motions on the screen as to which works better... And yet another interesting thing to note is that some of the parts I have in the scene are translucent... and if I bring the AVI into windows movie maker and export it to try and compress it some to it will fit onto CD... The translucent parts are covered with a large pattern checkerboarded... Nothing to do with IC, I realize, but interesting none the less... One nice thing about bringning it into windows movie maker, is that it splits the movie up whenever the camera angle changes... I have Adobe premiere at home I might have to give that a shot... I'm still having spurratic luck in getting what I consider a quality animation out of IC... So I'm considering using a video screen capture program to try and get something of higher output quality... Over a week has already been spent on setting up the animation alone... I wonder if I shouldn't have just modeled here and then brought the models into Maya for the animation... Maya would have probably choked tho... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 14, 2003 Share Posted February 14, 2003 Joel can you ftp the actual ironcad files to me and I will export them to avi here? I've seen that "checkerboard" thing happen with transparent images in the past (in other applications) but don't know anything about it. I'm really interested in exporting the avi from my system with my different graphics card (Quadro 4 980XGL) just to see if it looks and different than yours. I could export it to avi, then while playing the avi take a screen capture at a certain frame, and then you could compare that image to yours. I have worked with people in the past who just need higher quality than IronCAD can export. It's not uncommon to export over to Cinema4D or 3DS Max or another app of that nature just to perform the animation/export. We certainly can not claim to be truly production studio quality, but we can sometimes get close Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Parrish Posted February 15, 2003 Author Share Posted February 15, 2003 Chris, what's your FTP info? The IC files are 18meg zipped little too big for my email upload... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 15, 2003 Share Posted February 15, 2003 The easiest way to ftp them up is as follows: Launch Internet Explorer copy / paste the following address into it (replacing the entire address including the http://) ftp://ftp.ironcad.com/upload/ Once that page loads (it will be blank), just drag/drop the zip file into the blank IE window. Once it uploads, if you refresh Internet Explorer you'll find that your file "disappears". This is due to a security measure in place that prevents people from seeing each other's files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Parrish Posted February 18, 2003 Author Share Posted February 18, 2003 Chris, We finally got a decent animation out of IC... 500 dpi, same size as screen (1209 x 850), Cinepak, highest quality, 24 bit. Yeilding file is 780 meg & 3 minutes and 10 seconds... -JP Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 19, 2003 Share Posted February 19, 2003 Yay 780 meg avi, eesh. That's a big one. I'll bet it compresses down in a zip file to something like 1-200 megs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest dlalonde Posted February 19, 2003 Share Posted February 19, 2003 MPEG ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rbame Posted February 19, 2003 Share Posted February 19, 2003 Does the .png produce better results than exporting as tifs? That is the way I have done them in the past and then use Corel to recompress and crop all at one time.. it starts very large but gets smaller after it is compressed corel.. -Rodney Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Lohman Posted February 19, 2003 Share Posted February 19, 2003 There is no image quality difference between tiff and png if you are using the highest quality settings with no compression. Tiff does not support transparency or interlacing. Png support 2-D interlacing which uses a 7 pass save which allows it to save much faster than Tiff. Both Tiff and Png support lossless compression. By now the .png format should be accepted by all current graphics applications. The only reason that I can think of to use Tiff is for older apps or industries that can't support .png. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Andersson Posted February 19, 2003 Share Posted February 19, 2003 The problem is in the compression metods of the AVI format. -Use white as background color (or any solid color) This produce nicer anim's with no flicker in the background. Set the frameRate in IronCAD to like 24 frames/Sec. This is done by rightclicking the smartmotion editor/ Prop. Robert Andersson Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Parrish Posted February 19, 2003 Author Share Posted February 19, 2003 My animations have been exported with a solid background... The trouble I've been having with exporting smaller AVIs is that after the first couple frames all the part edges pixellate... The frames look like someone over compressed a jpeg... My framerate is 30 frames/sec (I could trim this back)... And I'd prefer the view size to be over 1024 x 768 (1280 x 1068 is prefered)... I've tried a couple AVI to MPG programs to try and shrink it down. Either they choke, or export a file worse than if I were to drop the DPI export in IC... The trouble I had with the PNG output method was the number of files I had... I had 3.5+ gig of images (5700 frames)... I tried to combine using Image Ready... Image Ready choked with a not enough memory error... I suppose I could have done small sections... And combined later... I have done small animations in the past to help show a customer how their machine is going to perform a specific function... Pretty small animations not needing the best quality, just to show the concept... However, this case is an assembly line proposal, lots of motion, camera angle changes.... It is a large job & I'd like to wow the potential customer... I guess the conclusion I am coming to is that IC has had the functionality to create animations for years, in fact if I remember correctly trisprectives had a couple things it could do... I've seen some advances in what can be done with the animations... I frankly don't use animations often, so I do not want to detract from the continuing advances in the mechanical & usability aspects of IC... But I'd hope that someone will look into how to export a better quality animation from IC, without having to play trial and error for days at a time... Joel Parrish www.pai-design.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Andersson Posted March 13, 2003 Share Posted March 13, 2003 I dont see the problem... Animations in the window size 1280 x 1068 will result in enourmus AVI files. You will have to distribute them on DVD media. Even if you get a perfect quality AVI, I think it's hard to find a PC to play a AVI that hugh on. I think it's quite easy to generate a good quality animation from IronCAD. An AVI window of 800x480 pixels is good for explain to and impress most customers. (The DPI value is not important when exporting animations.) Thats my 2 cents... Robert Andersson Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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