Last night, as I sat waiting for some compute-bound task to finish, I 
was idly wandering through the contents of my hard drive. Suddenly, I 
stumbled upon something utterly unexpected: I found a render I never 
knew I had.

Literally. I have no recollection of designing this scene, even though 
it's moderately complex. I certainly have no recollection of waiting for 
it to finish rendering - despite the fact that the render time is 
/obviously/ measured in multiple *months*! O_O

Most puzzlingly of all, it /looks good/. Which is extremely rare for 
anything *I* designed. :-o

OK, so I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I got this from 
someone else, right? Well no, that's not it. Quite apart from the file 
being almost 7GB in size and the POV-Ray source code being present, it's 
/obviously/ directly related to all the other files in that folder, 
which I /do/ remember making.

Basically, there's a folder containing a set of animations. Each one is 
roughly 5 minutes in length, and they start off trivially simple and 
gradually increase in complexity. I remember designing them all... 
except the final one, which is much more impressive than all of the 
rest, and would have had a much larger render time.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised I actually finished rendering all of 
these. 5 minutes is a /long/ animation. That's a heck of a lot of frames 
to render. (7,500 to be exact.) Unless you can keep the render time per 
frame below a few seconds, that rapidly spirals into multiple months of 
rendering. I remember sitting through the first few animations, 
rendering low-res previews and tweaking the settings, etc. But I don't 
recall rendering some of the later ones. And, again, the final one I 
have no recollection of it ever existing.

In short, I just discovered a really cool animation I didn't know I 
made. And it's finished! It's complete and everything.

Maybe I should put the whole set on YouTube? Then again, I'd have to 
transcode it somehow. Currently all the videos are uncompressed. Up to a 
certain resolution, that works. But once the image size gets large 
enough, it stops being possible to play them uncompressed; my harddrive 
isn't fast enough. Which is a bit of a problem, since I've yet to 
discover a codec which preserves all the crispness and detail that I've 
waited months to painstakingly render.

Even the mighty H.264 set to 9000 kbit/sec seems to blur and smudge my 
works. :-( (And it doesn't appear to be possible to set the bitrate any 
higher than that. The slider doesn't move any further.)

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On 05/09/2011 11:33 AM, Invisible wrote:

> Maybe I should put the whole set on YouTube? Then again, I'd have to
> transcode it somehow. Currently all the videos are uncompressed.

Actually, no. It's Huffyuv compressed.

I have "ffdshow" installed on my PC, which means that I can compress 
videos with VirtualDub. However, for reasons I don't full understand, it 
is impossible to *decompress* videos with VirtualDub. The videos play 
perfectly well, but when you ask VD to open them, it utterly insists 
that it can't find the correct codec. (My best guess is that it's 
looking for a codec named "Huffyuv", and ffdshow isn't called "Huffyuv".)

Does anybody know how to force VD to use ffdshow to decode the video? If 
you select the "advanced open dialog", it offers to let you specify a 
"FOURCC code", but I don't know if that helps...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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