exporting with 3d max

hello everyone ...I must ask: what is the best format to export an animation from 3dmax?
Targa Sequence?
Tiff Seq
an AVI?
Because most of my animation you can see alot of jitters,Speckles, noise, or whatever you call it!
ie: a camera moving around a planet
~Rory

 

Hey Rory,
I would recommend rendering with a TGA sequence for a few reasons. The first being, the options it gives you. You can choose whether or not you want to include and alpha channel (or a matte) in your file. If you are planning on compositing then you most likely render it with a alpha channel. However, if you are not using a matte then it would save on file space. If you would like to go back and render the matte separately later this file format allows you to do that. Whereas a TIFF sequence embeds the Alpha channel in the file.

The other good thing about rendering a sequence as opposed to an AVI or a MOV is time. Let's say you are rendering a 30 sec commercial that will take approximately 6 hours to render. You start your AVI render and leave, only to come back in the morning and find your computer has crashed and you have lost the entire file! SUCKS really bad, been there and done that! If you had rendered a TGA or TIFF sequence in this case you would have all the information rendered up to the point of the crash, so you would only have to pick up from where it left off.

As for a drawback to TGA sequence, you can't render audio into the file because it is a series of still images. However, you could render the audio track separately and piece the two together in editiing software (Premiere, Combustion or After Effects). Hope this helps you out.

Later
Steve Wishart
wishartgraphics

 

thanks Darth Steven even though I did not know about pros and cons of avi vs. TGA I have been exporting with TGA Sequence, but I just wasn't sure if there was a better exporting format. because like I said, when I export (IE: animation of a planet) it kind of jitters alittle bit...I just wanna know why?

thank you very much though!
~Rory

 

It could be a number of reasons as to why there is jitter...do you have a copy of the of the video in question to look at...

It could be anything from a path that you have attached your camera to not being smooth or it could be your video card??? Did you render it to fields or have any type of motion blur on it?? All these things need to be looked at...

Later
Steve

 

actually the best format to export that I have tried is as a quicktime .mov file with Sorenson 3 video compression, this is because it makes the file pretty small and it plays smothly and the quality is far superior than anything else.

 

The jitter can usually relate directly to your anti-aliasing settings. Decrease the filter value or change the aliasing type. You can also try rendering more than double the size and reducing it down in AE.

 

I would say in most, if not all, cases You really should render to TGA sequence. As someone said ealrier, if you have a crash over night, you can just start the render after the last successful frame. You can also compile the frames into whatever format you want in the editor of your choice or even MAX itself.