Want quicktime movies to look as good as SU animations
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Hello All,
I am doing some animations in SU that are destined to be DVDs. When I play the SU animations - they look great - no jaggies. When I export animation to quicktime (29.97, full DV quality, best compressor, interlaced) the QT looks ok (capitals omitted intentionally) but it lacks the smoothness of the SU animation. In other words the QT has jaggies. What can I do to make the the QT look SUPERB?
Thanks!
Jeff Olson
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Hi Jeff,
I'm not an expert at QT (and Macs in general) but usually a better result can be achieved by exporting a series of stills (preferably at a bigger resolution then downsampling them) and putting the animation together in a movie editor rather than exporting it straight from SU.
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Hi Jeff.
There are a few threads that are discussing this exact thing.
Definitely go here
I export with lines turned off, and with backfaces set to black.
Image sequences are definitely the way to go.
It is highly recommended, for best results, to render from SU at twice the resolution of your desired final product. (2560x1440 for 720p HD 1280 x 720, for example).
I, personally, use .png's, though .tiffs would be fine, too.
NO .jpeg's
I use Final Cut Express for final editing; it has a flicker filter that is a pretty nice cleanup for the movie.
So, a quick and dirty workflow would be:
In SU, you want a framerate of at least 24 frames per second. 29.97 for USA broadcast. I use 30, FWIW.
Export at twice the resolution, png or tiff. Make sure you have all these saving into a new folder.
Use Quicktime to open the image sequence, save this as a reference movie so Quicktime can open it quicker in the future.
You can now either open the reference movie in Final Cut, or Premier and go to town with editing, or you can export from Quicktime into whatever format you desire. With either option, make sure you set the export option for frame size to 1/2 the dimensions of your reference movie.
For export, I use only the H.264 format. Great quality and smaller file sizes.
To turn this into a DVD, there are a couple of ways to do it.
The easiest is to use iDVD, especially if you want chapter buttons and such.
You can also use Visual Hub, or similar, to convert to DVD. No chapters, but you get a .iso file quickly and easily. Burn with disk utility, or Toast, or iDVD
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I just noticed that you were exporting out with interlacing!
This will always look horrible on your computer screen; progressive is what you want.
I never interlace anything. If I had a clip that was going to be broadcast, it would made specifically for that and for nothing else. I would have other versions for computer, DVD, web, etc.
Also, I would highly recommend you upgrade to SU 7. There is a nasty mac issue with exporting close together parallel faces that can result in ugly flickering black triangles that flash around the screen. When I was using ver 6, I always used ver 5 to export out the sequences. Thankfully, they have fixed this in ver 7, which is great.
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Gaieus and kannonbal - you have been very helpful and I am most appreciative. I'll try those suggestions!
Cheers,
Jeff Olson
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