The Best Output???

papaf1 wrote on 6/2/2004, 8:16 PM
Can anyone tell me the best way to get the best quality from sequential images? I do mechanical animations with 3ds Max at my work and I render the animations to 720 X 480 sequential images. The images look great but when I render them in Vegas 5 to an mpeg1 or mpeg2 format at full screen they are blurry. Is there software that is needed to get the professional output to VCD or DVD? Is there a web site that can help with this?

D.R.

Comments

guns1inger wrote on 6/2/2004, 8:29 PM
If you are outputing to an interlaced format, you may be losing quality as it tries to create the fields from a progressive source (ie. your stills). There are two things I can think of now

1. Try using a higher bitrate in your encode (OK, limited for VCD, but no so for DVD).

2. Max can render to fields, which creates an interlaced source (renders two pics for each frame using alternate lines). This should solve the problem is this is the cause.

One last question - what are you saving your stills as ? If they are jpg, then this may be where your problems lie. Max's jpg algorithm is very poor, and creates very soft output. Always render stills to TGA, and if you need to compress them later use photoshop to produce jpgs.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/2/2004, 9:10 PM
Make sure that you tell Vegas that your source is progressive. This will make a big difference. The default is interlaced.

Also, are you changing the frame rate? Animation is often created at a lower frame rate than 29.97 fps (i.e., there are far fewer than 30 distinct pictures each second). You need to decide how to tell Vegas what to do when it creates those intermediate frames. For the sharpest quality, you want to disable resample. This will create no intermediate frames. The result will not be as smooth, however.
papaf1 wrote on 6/3/2004, 3:35 AM
Thank you so much for your help. I'm not sure about Rendering to Fields from Max, that's something I'm going to have to look in help for. I'm rendering to PNG format, it appears to be the same quality as the TGA format.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/3/2004, 5:25 AM
You could render to 24 fps progressive. That should work fine (and you won't need to worry about the 29.97 thing).

Try rendering a DV AVI and see if it looks blurry. The supersampling could be screwing things up (I've taken sequential still from Quake 3 into Vegas & had to turn supersampling off to have it look right).
papaf1 wrote on 6/3/2004, 10:39 PM
Well I finished my project today and used DVD Arch 2 to create the DVD. Why is it that even though the mp2 files in the project aren’t but 2.5g on the DVD it still needed to compress the animations? I also noticed that the output on a computer look fine but it needed some color correction for the TV, is there a good rule of thumb for color corrections to TV?