Animation Plugin Developed

[Ingsayyad]

@rwicks
Can you add an option of adding watermark or logo on the rendered video.

[Aussie LiDAR]

Hi,

The plugin is crashing at frame #27 when I save as mp4 or mkv. Normal mpg works fine but it would be great to have HD quality rendering h264, mp4 or mkv.

The instructions are not that clear as they just mention the codec will be auto detected from the file extension.
Is it possible to elaborate a bit or maybe give more control over the FFMPEG commands?

Thanks.
AL

[daniel]

Hard to tell what's going on. We are simply calling the ffmpeg library which itself calls a codec (whichever is installed on your system and seems able to do the job). Is the plugin always crashing at the exact same frame? Can you try with a smaller window maybe? (just to test).

[Aussie LiDAR]

The avi extension seems to work on my laptop. If i use the extension *.avi the codec used is mp4.
Maybe its an XVID or DivX codec?

How do I check if I have the right codecs installed? I can list them from WMP --> Help --> about.
Does FFMPEG not call it's own codecs? The website indicates they use the x264 encoder.

Is there a way i can set the 3D view size in CC?
It would be nice to be able to force these sizes, before using the animation plugin.

2160p: 3840x2160
1440p: 2560x1440
1080p: 1920x1080
720p: 1280x720
480p: 854x480
360p: 640x360
240p: 426x240

I did manage to drag the window so the size was exactly 1280 x 720 but saving as an mp4 or mkv did not work.
Crashed at frame #27.

Can you try saving an animation as *.mp4?

[daniel]

I could indeed reproduce the error. Google helped me find that it was a timing issue (each frame should be properly 'timestamped' for some codecs to work).

I'm not the one who wrote the plugin and I'm not an expert in ffmpeg. But at least my patch made this work on my side.

I've updated the latest beta version online. I'll let you test.

[Aussie LiDAR]

I have tested it and can confirm it now uses the h.264 codec to encode mp4.
I had a slight graphical glitch to start with but a reboot sorted that out.

There is a guide to h.264 bit-rates here http://www.lighterra.com/papers/videoencodingh264/

Thanks Daniel, keep up the good work.

[jochemla]

Hi everyone,
Sorry to dig up this old post. Is it possible to export frames of the animatoin using the plugin instead of a video file directly? I have compression artifacts when using this one, and think this comes from an incorrect ffmpeg parameter - I would rather use the frames directly in a composition software such as AfterEffects .
Thanks a lot for this, both of you! Jonathan

[daniel]

You 'simply' have to compile the plugin (and CC) without the FFMPEG support (see the 'WITH_FFMPEG_SUPPORT' variable in CMake).

In this case you'll get the option to select a folder as output, and CC will create one image file per frame. I guess we could modify the code so as to give the user the option... but that's not possible right now :D.

[daniel]

For the records, I've just added a new 'Export frames' button to the Animation plugin to create separate files instead of an animation. It will be available in the next release.

[jochemla]

Thanks daniel, sorry I hadn't seen your answer. I will try the compilation you mentioned in the meantime. Thanks again!
Jonathan