How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
MPEG-1 file?

I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.

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It would be a convenience, but nothing more far as I'm concerned.
It has been said before how such a thing might be done and of the two
ways I can recall only the render first/encode later way was feasible.
The other way was to add each successive frame into the
animation as it was being rendered.   I don't think anyone believed that
to be possible considering the way mpeg gets encoded, i.e. needing
following and preceding frames.  Even though video input can be turned
into mpeg, so there's probably a way to do this such as first getting
several frames rendered before starting the process.

Bob

"Jetlag" <bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote in message news:391f6101$1@news.povray.org...
| How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
| MPEG-1 file?
|
| I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.
|
|

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Jetlag <bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote:
: How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
: MPEG-1 file?

  I don't think outputting directly to a lossy animation format is a very
good idea. The reasons are the same as why outputting to jpg or gif is not
a good idea.
  Even outputting directly to some lossless animation format might have some
inconveniences, altough it would not be so bad.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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In article <391f6101$1@news.povray.org>, "Jetlag" 
<bga### [at] microsoftcom> wrote:

>How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
>MPEG-1 file?
>
>I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.

The Macintosh versions of POV can save directly to Quicktime. It sounds 
like it would be a useful feature, but in practice I never use it, even 
though about half of what I do ends up becoming a Quicktime movie. I 
think the only time I've used it seriously was in writing a tutorial 
that included how to use it :*)

The reason it isn't quite as useful as it sounds, is that rendering your 
frames usually takes longer than collating your movie. I don't want to 
have to render my frames again just because I chose poor settings for 
the movie-making process. So I still always render the frames to PNG and 
then use separate software to convert the frames into a movie. That way 
I can try all sorts of different compression settings and other options 
to get what I need.

Jerry

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Jetlag wrote:
> 
> How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
> MPEG-1 file?
> 
> I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.

I don't think many would use it.
I also suspect that even fewer would use it after having to rerender an
entire animation to fix a flaw in a few frames or because of incorrect
encoding options.

PoD.

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Jetlag wrote:
> 
> How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
> MPEG-1 file?
> 
> I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.

As I can say for me it is not that useful. When I do larger animations
they consist of several scenes which might have different scene
descriptions (pov-files). So I have to render the scenes seperately.
When rendering directly to mpeg1 then I have to connect the mpeg streams
with a tool.
I prefer to render single frames so I can do manipulation (let's say
with 'posttool'). Then I can very easily create a mpeg file with
multiple scenes using Sander Stols CMPEG6.
(Hi Sander, thanks for picking up some of my ideas).

Karl

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I would be much more interested in multiprocessor or LAN "Render Farm"
support.

ALSO:

I created a batch file in the DOS days to do animation renders that did all
the frames with a gap of 10.
i.e. it would render the frames in order 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 1, 21, 31,
41, 51, 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, ...

This way, I could tell if the animation was messed up in frame 83 sometime
before next Thursday.
I'd like to see the frames rendered like that or in another "interlaced"
order.

OH!

Since parsing is so time consuming, isn't there a way to parse it all once
and do all the rendering from one parse?


Jetlag wrote:

> How many people would find it useful for POV-Ray to save directly to an
> MPEG-1 file?
>
> I'm just fact-finding for those wondering.

--
Bryan Valencia
Software Services - Making Windows Scream
http://www.209software.com
mailto:bry### [at] 209softwarecom

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"Bryan Valencia" <bry### [at] 209softwarecom> wrote in message
news:393C2CA1.AAA2AC2C@209software.com...
| i.e. it would render the frames in order 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 1, 21, 31,
| 41, 51, 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, ...
|
| This way, I could tell if the animation was messed up in frame 83 sometime
| before next Thursday.
| I'd like to see the frames rendered like that or in another "interlaced"
| order.

That would be a good feature, I agree.  But not really to check every
individual frame since to see #9 or 99 would still take a while.  I just
setting the number of frames to 1/10, for example, or the final number for
testing the animation.  That does no good though if all is okay and you reset
back to the final number of frames since they will be timed wrong.  So, that
is a good idea.

| Since parsing is so time consuming, isn't there a way to parse it all once
| and do all the rendering from one parse?

I'd have to say bad idea even if possible.  Or at least in the way I think it
would be worked.  Probably like adding all frame parses into a series before
beginning the actual renders, in which case there could be a large amount of
memory used thus making this idea not too feasible for everything.
Any other way would probably be quite a feat of programming maybe.

Bob

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Bryan Valencia <bry### [at] 209softwarecom> wrote:
: I'd like to see the frames rendered like that or in another "interlaced"
: order.

  This would work as long as the current frame does not depend on the
previous one.
  I have made two type of animations with frames depending on the result of
the previous frame:
  - In my spider robot animation I saved the location of the legs of the robot
to a file and then read them in the next frame and modified them a bit and
so on. In MegaPov this could be done with persistent variables, but the
problem is exactly the same.
  - I made a macro that allowed creating recursive images (ie. an image which
contains the image itself in a smaller version, for example in a painting,
which contains the same image and so on) which uses the animation feature in
order to achieve this: It just uses the previous frame as an image map on
some object.

: Since parsing is so time consuming, isn't there a way to parse it all once
: and do all the rendering from one parse?

  Some things can depend greatly on the clock variable. For example consider
this:

#if(clock<.5)
  do_something
#else
  do_something_else
#end

  or even this:

#declare Seed=clock*100;
#if(rand(Seed)<.5)
  do_something
#else
  do_something_else
#end

  How can povray deduce which one of the #if blocks should it take without
parsing the #if-statement?

  Megapov, however, supports persistent variables, which should help a lot
in this process. It doesn't, however, help in this type of cases.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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