Also sprach "Andrew Coppin" <orp### [at] btinternetcom> -- Sun, 21 Sep 2003 20:39:47
+0100:

>Does that make sense?
>
>POV-Ray -> still frames (TARGA, 640x480, 24 bits/pixel, 25 frames/second)
>still frames -> VirtualDub -> AVI (uncompressed, no sound yet)
>AVI + WAV -> TMPGEnc -> MPEG-1, audio is layer-II at 192 kbits/second
>
>OK, so hopefully I'm not the only person in this list to use these
>programs... (cos if I am... oh dear.)
>
>I have currently created about 48 seconds of moving video (28 seconds is
>"finished", the rest needs tinkering with). But I did a test run at 640x480
>to see if my computer can cope with it. It can't.
>
>First, the complete track is about 6 minutes long. TMPGEnc helpfully informs
>me that I need to generate 9,447 frames. Well, it turns out that (depending
>on detail) 9,447 frames of RLE TARGA takes up roughtly 6GB. So I have to put
>the frames on another partition.

I, too, am working on an "epic"; about 16:43 long.
I selected a music piece that i recorded years ago.  I really wanted to do a
Frank Zappa piece, but what with copyrights i thought i'd stick with something
i own.

I currently have 3 scenes "complete", about 8 minutes.  I find it easiest to
work with about 3000 frames at a time.  
I am rendering 720x480 .png frames.
I use TMPGEnc to build a .m2v out of my .png frames.
Yes, i am using MPEG2.  I know Warp is hot and bothered for MPEG4, but i have
never made an MPEG4 that i was really happy with.

Plus, i can burn the MPEG2 to DVD which MPEG4 can not do.  It is nice to be able
to play my animation on The Big Screen, and the DVD should make fine Christmas
presents (maybe in 2006 when i finish this). :)

I used CDex to extract the .wav audio in scene-size pieces, so i can work on
smaller sections at a time.

I use Ulead VideoStudio 7 (came with my ATI card) to stitch the scenes together.
The important thing here is that the scenes are not re-rendered during
stitching.  VirtualDub will force a re-render because it has to break down the
IBP GOPs [1] into individual frames which will add additional loss/noise to the
video.  I believe you can use TMPGEnc to stitch scenes together without
re-rendering; i haven't tried that yet.

If you have a DVD player on your computer, then you got WinDVD with it, which
installs the codecs to play MPEG2 in Media Player.  You will have to pay for the
MPEG2 version of TMPGEnc.

In addition to the DVD version, i have also created a VCD version of my
animation (352x240 NTSC) which also can be played on The Big Screen, but
obviously doesn't look as nice.  The advantage is the free version of TMPGEnc
will make these, and then (free) VCDEasy will make the disc from your .mpg .

Another nice tool i'm using is ACDSee Classic 2.43 .  This is great for
previewing the images as a pseudo-animation.  It can do about 50ms per frame,
which is not full speed but close enough.  And the mouse wheel can roll back and
forth between frames/images which is great for motion debugging.

And of course, my own renderfarm manager.

The first thing you can do for yourself though is dump the .tga in favor of .png
files.  Here's some of my sizes (for 720x480 frames)
dir   files   size
ttco  3676    174MB
tteo  3926    575MB
ttho  2707    291MB  (this scene is rendering to 3340 frames)
ttfo     0      0    (Hmm, i must have deleted these frames after mpg encoding)

If you do go with MPEG2, remember that as a europover, you'd want 720x576 25fps.

Storyboard for my animation:
http://cvs.buckosoft.com/Projects/pov/~checkout~/ttCommon/Storyboard.txt?content-type=text/plain

Renderfarm in action:
http://www.buckosoft.com/bsac/

[1] GOP = Group Of Pictures.  An I frame is like a jpeg image.  B and P frames 
    are "just the difference" between "this" frame and "the next" frame.
    I is lossy, B and P are more lossy.  (This is a super simple explanation of
    B and P) 

dik

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