Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi to all fractals fans and developers, I'm Zeta Forest from Argentina.
I'm here as a beginner, and I like much fractals animation.
But... this is my problem.I do not get to make a good quality animation avi  :-\
In this particular case, I'm trying to render an animation of 5':33" (10000 frames) and I have not managed to do. I have tried several codecs such as Cinepak by radius (18 hours of rendering) Xvid in one pass (24 hours of rendering) and H264 Lossles one pass (26 hours of rendering)
My CPU is an AMD Fx six core 3.2 GHz Fx.
In previous animations only this has delayed 2 hours, but now, my god!
Thanks and Merry Christmas!

Hello and welcome!

What software are you using?  Are you trying to render an avi directly from a fractal generator?

For best results render an image sequence and compile that in a video editor. 

Hope that helps   

Enjoy the forums.  O0

Hi! I'm Ultra Fractal user, and...yes, I´m trying to render an avi from Ultra Fractal  ::)
So that's it?
But ... how to do that?

this question arises every now and then, but first: hello and welcome to the forums

search for "virtualdub" to make out of your single frames a movie clip
or use this link:
http://www.virtualdub.org/

regards

Maybe there is something basic I do not understand?
I know Virtualdub and usage. But if I've only done Ultrafractal animation, how do I render something with Virtual dub?
I suppose I must first export the animation in any format, and then process that with Virtual, OK?
I must render to hard drive first the animation? or what?
Thank you !

I have 10000 frames, how I can export in single frame the entire animation?

Rendering animations - Ultra Fractal : Manual (http://www.ultrafractal.com/help/exporting/renderinganimations.html)

I render image sequences to an uncompressed avi with virtualdub.
I use HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr/) to compress to mp4.

Hope this helps.

Well, not any format.  NEVER use jpg for example!  You want a lossless format like png or tiff or even bmp.  png is the best choice for lossless compression vs file size format in my opinion.

You'll need to render the sequence "to disc" - which is where I feel ultrafractal really falls behind all other fractal generators for doing animation.  You need to wait for the entire sequence to render before seeing a single frame!!  That is totally unacceptable when animating a long sequence if you want to "work ahead" setting up video files for compositing or whatever.  Frederick said he was going to "fix" that several years ago, but I have yet to see any action on this.

But regardless, rendering your project to disc, using a lossless image format, is the key here.  jpg's are compressed using a "lossy" process, and if you compress them again for making a video your quality drops dramatically.  Always work lossless, and uncompressed if possible, right up until the final render  (and keep your lossless originals backed up someplace in case you want to re-work anything!).

Hope that helps.  Feel free to ask if you have any other questions.

Thank you!
Well, English is not my native language.
But I understand quite well.
So maybe I have to make cuts in bmp or tiff of 100 frames to render to disk? Then join the 100000 frames with Virtualdub?
Ok, I will try this.
Thank you and Merry Christmas
And my first animation, poem and sound edition  :dink:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lQzx5nRkrU

I'm glad you understand.  My Spanish is only what I learned in high school several decades ago, and I am out of practice   :sad1:


You can render the whole sequence to disc if you are patient, I just had an issue with Ultrafractal where I was rendering for a commercial project, and having to wait for 17,000 frames of a deep zoom caused significant time loss and deadline troubles.

Virtual dub is not good for combining image sequences.  It only appends other avi files to the end of an existing one.  You'd need a slightly more advanced editor for multiple image sequences  (I use Pinnacle Studio, but Sony Vegas is good too)  (If you can afford the Adobe products like Premiere or After Effects, they are good too - but prohibitively expensive!).

nuestro foro conteniedo un parte para espanoles tambien, solo und poco personas aqui, pero proximo ano mi plano eso es extendario ese

i am no spanish native tambien ;)

Not true. If you select "Open video file" in VirtualDub, you can also open images (bmp, png, jpg, etc). Give your images consecutive numbers (like myvid00000.jpg, myvid00001.jpg, etc) and check "automatically load linked segments" and the complete batch will be loaded

I guess I wasn't clear enough.

I already suggested he use VirtualDub for combining a single sequence, but the notion of multiple sequences arose, and VD can only handle one sequence at a time.  The other video editors mentioned allow as many sequences as you want to be arranged however you want, regardless if they all have the same naming convention - as long as each element being combined is a properly named sequence.  VD can join multiple avi segments, but cannot combine multiple image sequences, just one image sequence at a time.

Sorry for the confusion.

Hola zeta forest, bienvenido! aquí Kali de Argentina también, espero que te guste el foro. Muy lindo video, y emotivo poema, te felicito.

Saludos,

Hola Kali! Una alegría encontrar coterráneos aquí! Espero que mantengamos el contacto amigo! y gracias por el cumplido :embarrass:
Thanks to all for your answers, although I realize that there are many different opinions about what I have to do.
Some answers are a bit puzzling,But I guess this is my ignorance about Ultrafractal posibilities and language.The proposal by 0Encrypted0 is directly referred to ultrafractal, but I can not understand how to do that ... :angry:
meanwhile my animation is rendering, with the Cinepak codec. 36 hours have passed and goes to 60%.
It's a shame that I can not know what the final outcome quality.
A big data Sokratease has given me, about the format Lossles.
I will be patient and continue studying.
If anyone manages to explain a step by step process to render fractal animation of 10000 frames to an avi format, using ultrafractal and others software, I will be very grateful!

Render animation from UF as individual frames (I'd suggest png format) then use Virtualdub or Streamclip to convert to whatever video file format you prefer - both these will give access to any codecs that are available on your system - I think Streamclip does require that Quicktime is installed (at least the free version).

:) Those are very short times for large animations !!

Thank you David. :dink:
I did not know that a 5 minute animation, demanded many hours of processing  :sad1:
I'll wait until UF finish and I see this then how is the result.
Thank you to all  :beer:
(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/2725/37983806.png)

Well, were 124 hours to render, and the result was an avi with 0 bytes (0!)
Now I'm following your advice and rendering to the hard disk as PNG.
Thank you and happy new year!