Welcome to Fractal Forums

Here is why you should consider Very Carefully before getting into fractal generators!!



(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/crap.jpg)



Crap.

Lots of stuff to burn to CD-ROM this weekend...

There are also many areas of the Windows system and it's settings which could be checked to see if you are using more disk space than you really need to.

Just by going to "Power Options" within Control Panel, and then going to the Hibernate tab to turn off Hibernation will most likely free up a gigabyte or so (depending on your particular system).

And another item is within "System Properties" of My Computer, under the System Restore tab, click the Settings button to see what is being allocated there.

Yup...

I've disliked windows since I first saw 3.1 

I already did the system restore thing long ago, but I never knew about the Hibernate feature using that much space!  I'll try that too!

Thanx!!

Much space freed by deleting ALL those 800 MB avi files complied from 1,000 Bitmaps.

I NEED to learn about codecs for this.

I can't seem to hit anything below 80 to 100 MB per minute and maintain image quality.

Further compression ruins things.

I've seen 10 MB files that ran almost 2 minutes and looked Great!

More research I guess.

I made a serious topic in the "Let's Collaborate" category for that. I only posted the image here in the Humor section because I thought it was funny.

I had a TI 1,000  for over 20 years before I upgraded.

Wrote Lots of programs in Basic (mostly creating sound effects for videos).

Never filled the hard drive!!

I'm running out of Virtual Memory constantly now...

Weeeeeeeeeee!

http://www.koepi.org/XviD-1.1.2-01112006.exe (look around for 2-pass encoding guides)
http://x264.nl/ (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264)

Yeah, and clean those temp folders! - but burn CDs before you end up with too little drive space to burn a CD! LOL

Just for the record, you should defrag before burning backups - and you need some free space to do that! Also, the best way to burn a large number of smaller files is to write an iso to the hard drive first so that the burn will go smoothly and you won't get a "coaster" instead of a good CD. CD burners must have a perfectly steady flow of data, and scattered, fragmented files cause a lot of hard drive "seeking" activity that can choke the flow. One tiny disruption and the CD is dead plastic.

I have the same problem. I can never bring myself to compress my 24-bit BMP images to a lossy format like JPG either and formats like PNG are harder to write save/load code for. I should really go find a library that does it. I just keep buying more and more external 200GB USB hard-drives :)

modern hard drives can keep up with cd and dvd burning speeds quite well; this is especially true of large files.


that was back in the days of 4x burners :)


http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

Actually, this problem can still occur quite often even with newer hardware, systems, and burning software.  I have a 2-GHz DELL Dimension P-4 with a Samsung CDRW/DVD SM-332B, and use Roxio's CD Creator version 5 on it.  I burn a lot of CD on that machine, and out of a few hundred that I went through last year, I have about 25 that are now useless.

And It happens more often if I use Microsoft's CD burning options built into the Windows-XP operating system, no matter what the hardware is.

there certainly is a big software factor involved; i recommend deepburner - it's free and really good, especially when it comes to buffering. this is what makes nero considerably more reliable than other burning applications - when you use a large buffer the hard drive can catch up when reading big files, the burning isn't affected by small system stalls, etc.

i used to get the same problems when using adaptec's easycd program (i think it was called). just like with download managers, there's a lot of crap software out there :)

Thomas Ludwig (lycium) wrote:
>
>    ...i recommend deepburner - it's free and really good....
>    this is what makes Nero considerably more reliable than
>    other burning applications...

Yes, Nero is a fairly stable and fast application, and easy to use.

>
>    i used to get the same problems when using adaptec's
>    easycd program (i think it was called).

It's been about a decade since I used Adaptec's program.  But back then, it was pretty good on my system.

We don't all have perfect computers, Lycium, dear.

ha, my computer is far from "perfect" :) what is a perfect computer anyway? "one day, computers will be fast..."

i've used many computers, from a greenscreen apple to my current powerful-but-not-quite-state-of-the-art desktop machine; i'll be using a 1.5ghz laptop for commercial coding work soon while "on holiday", and that's beside the point anyway - no machine since 1997 (which is roundabout the time of adaptec's easycd creator paul and i were discussing) should really have difficulty burning cds using decent software.

edit: for what it's worth, i'm also having storage problems on my limited machine, thanks in part to fractal animations - 1 second of uncompressed hd animation takes 150mb!

Ah, thanks :)

Thomas Ludwig (lycium) wrote:
>
>    "one day, computers will be fast..."

Years ago, I used to want my own personal Cray (back when they were fast).    ;)

>
>    for what it's worth, i'm also having storage problems on my
>    limited machine, thanks in part to fractal animations - 1 second
>    of uncompressed hd animation takes 150mb!

With the increase of videos and animation, PCs will soon come standard with TerraByte hard drives.  (Personally, that is too little for my current needs.)    ;)

i'm sure you now see, with the proverbial 20/20 hindsight, how fortunate you were not to make that purchase! those crays were absolutely horrible to program, due to the fact that they cut so many corners for speed; for example they didn't support ieee floating point arithmetic, which of course means that while your computations can be fast, they can never be accurate! on some crays it was so bad that 1.0 * x != x, something guaranteed (with stronger bounds) by ieee754.

even in 2006/2007 there are programmers snubbing the utility of floating point computations... but that's another matter ;)

another apocryphal (american) quote: "all the speed in the world won't help if you're headed the wrong way!"



modern video compression techniques (mpeg4 avc, wavelet methods, ...) can squeeze some ridiculously high quality hd video into just a few megabits of bandwidth. it's extremely impressive really; i've been reading about video compression for longer than even ray tracing (which in turn i've studied about 6x longer than fractals, in years) and it's just incredible to see how much progress has been made approaching the true entropy of the video signal. thanks to this i get away with 300gb of storage :D

I haven't tried it yet but a video codec maybe worth checking out is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac)

Apparently it's a research codec being developed by the BBC.

that's the wavelet codec to which i was referring :) there have been others before it too, like the ones by charles bloom: http://www.cbloom.com/src/index_im.html

edit: btw, i suspect that bink (http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm) may be based on such an approach as bloom describes.

i just finished encoding a julia animation using some new codecs:

* lagarith, similar to huffyuv in that it predicts the image mean and encodes the differences but using more modern (patented?) compression algorithms
* x264, an opensource implementation of the popular mpeg4 avc spec

first things first: lagarith outperformed huffyuv very impressively, producing a 25mb file compared to huffyuv's 37mb! the encoding was also noticably faster, this is because although lagarith is much slower (in terms of cpu cycles per byte) it ends up writing a lot less data; it's quite a stable codec and supports both 64bit and multithreading, which makes me very happy of course :)

x264, a lossy codec, managed to compress this video to just under 2mb! that's really really impressive, and the while the encoding time was pretty long (and didn't multithread properly) the results are definitely worth it.

here's the x264 encoded video: http://www.fractographer.com/wip/julia_x264.avi

you can go here to get x264: http://x264.nl or google for ffdshow (which is highly recommended anyway!), ditto for lagarith.

Thomas Ludwig (lycium) wrote:
>
>   another apocryphal (american) quote:  "all the speed in the world
>   won't help if you're headed the wrong way!"

There are some theorists that say the universe is circular, so even if one does head in the wrong direction, you'll eventually get where you need to, or end up back where you started.     ;)  :D   ;D

well if it comes to that, we should bear in mind that the fastest we can ever go is the speed of light; even at a mere 13.7 billion lightyears (only what we can see, not what's "out there") i think the universe will have long expanded into a 0K void before we can hope to reach our original position through any kind of cyclic behaviour ;)

i forgot to mention that lightspeed travel can be uncomfortable: even though i'm really skinny, in reducing my mass to exactly 0 some drastic compromises have to be made ;)

another x264 test video: http://www.fractographer.com/wip/julia2_x264.avi

i notice that white is not being preserved during playback, it doesn't look so great :( will have to look into this; at least the crispness is maintained.

Lycium, you sure you want to be putting x264 into AVIs?  I mostly see people using MP4 for this.  I've read that x264-in-AVI is a hack which doesn't comply with the official specs for AVI or H.264, and it's not widely supported by video player apps.  I can't play your Julia animations with QuickTime, for example, though they play in VLC.

hmm i really like virtualdub though, it does exactly what i need :/ do you know of any simple editors like vdub that can spit matroska (or whatever the hot fashion is)? i save a series of bmp frames, and i guess my win32 vfw saving code won't be of any help...

I think VirtualDubMod can do Matroska.

Nice chart here comparing the containers:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats

Well...

Look what I started!

Yup.

I crashed my computer and had a hard time getting it all working again, but I got an external hard drive and cleaned out everything.

Time to read all the reference links in here and study up!

No more 800 MB avi files that run a mere 1,000 frames for me!

On the topic (off topic) of archiving your renders or any data for that matter, it's a very very good idea to look into adding parity archive redundancy data to each disk.  Adding 2-5% PAR2 data makes your data SO much more reliable as it will allow you to recover from any minor damage, like a scratch or whatever, anywhere on the disk.  2-5% redundant data is usually enough to cover a good deal of damage, but you can always add more. 
Take a look at www.quickpar.com and read up on the benifits of par2. 
Also, it's best to place the PAR2 data at the END (the outer edge) of the CD.  This can be done with Nero by selecting the properties of the PAR2 file(s) and setting their priority to high.  Happy burning!

Tim M. (Euph0ria) wrote:
>
>    On the topic (off topic) of archiving your renders or any data for that matter....
>    Take a look at www.quickpar.com (http://www.quickpar.com) and read up on the benifits of par2.

Greetings, Tim.    And thanks for the above tip.   :)

Nice to see another long time user of FractInt (http://www.Nahee.com/spanky/www/fractint/fractint.html) in the group.  Enjoyed the "Fractal Heart of Chaos" image and would have loved seeing that in the 30x20 poster you had made.

Anyway...    Welcome to this Forum!!    :)
 

try the microsoft media encoder

its what i use to convert AVI to WMV (which is like MPEG4) for posting on my site

file size = file size * 0.10

and very good quality, not much loss in resolution

also, its free!

mp4 is fine for online use, I guess...

But I'm just too fond of my Lossless codec friends now!  I have no clue why so many big commercial players and programs don't support them!!  Maybe because they are part of the Free and Open Source market?

But they are 100% LOSSLESS!!

File size is still a bit big, but nothing near the 4 GB per minute level! More like 50 MB per minute  (I know - 10 MB per minute is considered big, but that's where the loss of quality comes in!).

I just got a 1 Terrabyte External drive.  I'm saving many of these as compressed and lossy, but keeping the parameter files to re-create if I ever want to.  The ones with no parameter sets just have to stay as they are.

I have an old video editor which does a fine job of converting the avi files VirtualDub makes in to high quality wmv for uploading to video hosts, but their encoding just kills it. 

I do have an old version of the windows media encoder anyhow, but I rarely use it.  I thought it was discontinued at microsoft anyhow.  Did they revive it?  Will it support the Lagarith Lossless Codec?  Or the Huffy UV Lossless Codec?

I'd love to try and encode an mp4 with one of those, but no software seems to allow the combination...

I saw a good shirt the other day while walking through my local electronics shop. It said: "My laptop has more memory than I do".

On a similar note - I caused ultrafractal to crash the other day by trying to render a 40"x30" image a 720 dpi - so it's not limitless yet. It seems to be happy doing it at 600 DPI though, which still should result in a 1.2gb bitmap image. Yes, png is lossless, but it will take half an hour for PSP to finally load after it deals with all of the work to decode it. PSP is the slowest program known to man (excluding Ulead's one and photoshop on a mac, which, amazingly, are slower).

You use a PlayStation Portable for Fractals?

Wow...

[/sarcasm]

I cannot access quickpar. The link redirects to spam.

74.5 GB? My hard drive is relatively small, and it's 500 GB. I think that clearly means you need a bigger hard drive.

Did you notice the date on the post?

January 18, 2007.

That was ample back then...

Oops. Used to more crowded forums where only stuff posted on in the last hour is up.