RenderImageSequence.js giving me duplicate frames

Cheesehole wrote on 1/29/2004, 11:30 AM

I'm rendering a ten frame sequence and getting doubles on frames 3 and 4. Project settings are pretty simple. 29.97 progressive. Same as the source footage. Quantize to frames is ON. When I step frame by frame through the timeline there are no duplicate frames, but when I save to an image sequence using 1.000 frames as a step time, I get duplicates.

Anyone see this behavior?

It's incredibly slow too. Kind of a lame image exporter considering Premiere has had a good one for at least 5 or 6 years. I'll probably end up frame serving to Vdub but I was really curious to find an answer to this duplicate frame riddle.

Thanks!

- Ben

Comments

roger_74 wrote on 1/29/2004, 11:48 AM

Can't help with the duplicate frames, but I can tell you why it's slow. Vegas scales the image to the correct pixel aspect ratio, using Good or Best (I forget which) resampling. When you frameserve to VirtualDub you get the original size. Frameserving is much better if you ask me, because most of the time the sequence is going to end up on video anyway, requiring another rescaling if you use just Vegas.

Cheesehole wrote on 1/29/2004, 12:31 PM

Actually it is the PNG compression that makes it take so long. Rendering to JPG is more reasonable. The resizing happens almost real-time so it shouldn't be much of a factor, but I totally agree that I'd much rather get the full frame and not the resized version. Looks like frame-serving is a good compromise. I'd better hit the Vegas 5 feature request page :)

Thanks for the assistance.

- Ben

johnmeyer wrote on 2/6/2004, 4:44 PM

I'm glad you posted this. The script is slow, and renders at lower than 720x480. The frameserve to Virtualdub (saving to BMP format) solves both problems. Actually, for what I am doing, I don't even have to frameserve: just open the video in Virtualdub and save out the image sequence. After I've processed the images in Photoshop, I think I'll just recombine them in VD, because I think that will be faster than Vegas' import media and subsequent render to AVI.

P.S. (edit): I just opened an AVI file in VirtualDub and played around with the settings. I found three things that significantly improved the rendering to a still image sequence, and allowed me to approach real time on my 2.8 GHz P4:

1. Select Video -> Fast Recompress. Direct Stream copy goes fast, but doesn't produce useable files.

2. Use BMP, not Targa. This only produced a slight improvement in speed, but I think it is worth doing.

3. Render to a separate hard disk. This always helps, and this is no exception.

4. Go to VD's Option -> Performance dialog. Increase AVI output buffering by 2-3 notches, and do the same thing with Stream data pipelining. This produced a 50% improvement on my test (went from one minute thirty to exactly one minute, for the same exact render).

SonyPJM wrote on 4/12/2004, 9:31 AM

The step time field is interpreted as a timecode string... if you've
entered the value "1.000", that may not be interpreted the same as
"00:00:00:01".