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From lurking here, it seems like it takes a long time for a computer to render a fractal zoom, at even modest resolutions. What, if you had a relatively decent computer, would you estimate the time it might typically take to do a neat looking fractal zoom at a high HD resolution, specifically 1080p.

By the way, I like this forum, what a great resource it is for people interested in it!

James

Hello and Welcome to the forum!

The question is too broad.  It depends upon the settings involved for rendering, and the actual fractal types used.

Deep zooms can take months, regardless of the computer.

Then there is frame rate - 30 frames per second would require many more images to reach ten minutes than 12 frames per second  (30 is "industry standard for TV and such, 12 has been used in Flash games - but 12 would look HORRIBLE for fractals).

There is also a question of which generator you use!  Some are much faster than others.

Try to narrow things down a bit if you can.

But my advice is to just grab a free fractal generator and do a test run!

Have fun with it!

An nVidia GTX 285 or GTX 470/480 should manage full screen mandelbrot fractals in real time using CUDA. However it's computing in single floating point precision (32bit only) and hence it severely limits how far you can zoom in. The software developer kit for CUDA comes with this Mandelbrot sample.

But some kind of "tour" with multiple hops (zoom in to one detail, then zoom out and pan to another detail before zooming back in) could be computed in 10 minutes, and presented in 10 minutes.... simultaneously ;)

Greetings, and Welcome to this particular Forum !!!    :)

Sockratease and Christian Buchner have both given you some useful information to think about.  But if you are wanting to do deep zooms, then you can expect it to take many hours (most likely days) to finally get something worth the effort.  I have a fairly decent machine (8 processors with 16-GB RAM, and a very nice graphics card), but it still takes a lot of time to set up the exploration.

And if you want a really good video, you should consider making the fractal images match the music that you intend to use.
 

Thanks for the responses, guys.

First of all, what software do you recommend for a newbie to try a high resolution deep zoom? I would like to make a blu ray demo for my home theater, so I guess the FPS would be 24 (can blu ray players playback 1080p at more than 24 fps?). I don't know about fractal types, I guess something that looks nice, like say a Mendelbrot or Julia set?

By the way, I don't have a newer Nvidia card, so that CUDA stuff is out for me. That technology does look interesting though, I have read about it.

I have played around with a program called Fraqtive, it was fun but I don't think it will animate a zoom.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Whatever software you use to burn the blue-ray should prevent you from burning a disc at a frame rate standard player will reject.

As for what software for a deep zoom, I only ever had the patience for a deep zoom once (and it wasn't that deep either) but I used Ultra Fractal.  I don't know if there are other good ones for deep zooming or not, but I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse UF as the way to go  (The Animation Edition is EXPENSIVE, but it was for a commercial job, so I justified it).

Maybe Visions of Chaos (http://softology.com.au/voc.htm)?  I know it does deep zooming, but it seems to take far longer than Ultra Fractal to render a similar magnification with a similar color palette & similar maximum iterations / bailout values.  But Visions Of Chaos is 1/3 the price of Ultra Fractal!

Both have free trials though, so give 'em the test drive I mentioned.

As for freeware, I can't praise  ChaosPro (http://www.chaospro.de) enough, but it does not do truly deep zooms.

If you want a 3 Dimensional Fractal to fly around instead, try Jesse's Mandelbulb 3D  (use the "Downloads" link at the top of the page!) or the free  Chaoscope (http://www.chaoscope.org) which has a separate program available to make it do animations (called anim4chaoscope - it's in their Downloads pages someplace).
I'm sure there are many more.  I tend to forget the obvious ones.  I trust others will offer more ideas for software...


EDIT:   Fractint!!  That's another good free one for deep zooms, but I never tested it myself for that, so have no clue about it's render times....

Are you familiar with the works of Lloyd Garrik (JackOfTraDeZ):
    http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?topic=656.0 (http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?topic=656.0)

And if you have not read this posting, it should be another one of interest:
    http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?topic=970.0 (http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?topic=970.0)

The current trend within this Forum are the Mandelbulb and Mandelbox videos.  You can get a good idea of what is involved with making a video by using the Mandelbul3D application by Jesse:
    http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?board=168.0 (http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?board=168.0)
 

If you need a free program then for what you want I'd suggest ChaosPro, if you can afford to buy then get Ultra Fractal 5.

As to time to render at 1080p - to give you some idea lets say (on the bright side) that the average 1080p frame takes 10 seconds (very fast for a fractal zoom movie and assuming a simple formula and not too much "inside" on view) then for 10 minutes at 24 fps it will take 10*60*24*10 seconds to render i.e. 40 hours and that's without any AA and very generous, if zooming to say a medium magnification of around 1e6 or so then you can probably up the average frame render time to around a minute instead of 10 seconds even for a quick formula.

A proper quality rendered zoom movie to say max. 1e10 magnification with say 3*AA is basically going to take weeks @1080p with 24 fps for 10 minutes..

Note that the above is assuming you have say a quadcore system - if you had a dual quadcore then things would be somewhat faster.

Also I suspect some specific software may be faster for a limited number of formulas - for instance Xaos but I'm not sure how easy that is to use for producing very long animations.

Of course if you're after really deep zooms beyond 1e16 then you're into a different world altogether :)

Thanks for the tips!

I fooled around with ChaosPro tonight, I even managed to make some zoom animations and a couple other things. It was fun.

A couple questions- how much better is ultra fractal 5 over chaosPro?

Also, I noticed that when I boosted up the iteration value, it took longer to calculate. My understanding of that value is that the larger it is, the further you can zoom in on a border or some nook and see detail? Like in a Mendelbrot set? So if I wanted to do a ultra deep zoom, that value would need to be very large? How does "bailout" relate to iteration?

Also, can you guys give me some tips on how to make my zooms better?

I checked out some of those links, very interesting stuff. I'd love to see some of those mandebulb structures animated, I am sure that would look incredible (but also take an incredibly long time to process).

ChaosPro is a Great program, but it chokes on deep zooms.  The only advantage Ultra Fractal has over Chaos Pro is it's ability to do deep zooms.  Even the interfaces are very similar!

As for making your zooms better, do more of the things you like!

Not sure what you'd consider better, but I like doing things like cycling the colors while animating.  Here's a video done in chaos pro with no animation other than color cycling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCSjRHnKwY

Combining that technique with camera movements and formula transformations is fun :)

Personally, I and many others agree, UF is not worth the price and hassle:


Sounds like you want a crash course on the basics of fractal generation.  May I suggest that you do a bit more reading from one of the several hundred web sites that have tutorials available.  This is not something that one decides to master on a whim.


Lots of practice using the fractal generator of your choice.  And spending time reading all of the "tips" that have already answered the same basic questions.  I know that this is all brand new to you, but slow down a bit and do some reading before jumping in head first.


There are a few hundred already available for viewing, just browse around some more.  You will find them and maybe be able to answer all of the questions you currently are asking.

As to time consuming, a decent and quick fly-through of the Mandelbulb can be rendered in less than an hour.  But it will not be a 10-minute zoom.
 

You might want to consider other types of animations than zooms.  For a 10-minute piece, you'll almost certainly wind up in deep-zoom territory, which will take a long time to render.  Parameter sweeps can be interesting, too, or maybe use something like Windows Movie Maker to put together a string of shorter pieces into your final animation.

shadyJ,
From a purely experimental point of view, don't worry touching the bailout if you want to do zooms. Keep the default value. The bailout value is the test done at each iteration to check if the point will escape to infinity or not.

As you have understood, the deeper the zoom near the border of a fractal set, the higher the iteration count needs to be, otherwise you lose the finest details. This is something every fractalist knows very well.

I don't agree with Nahee regarding litterature. Of course it's important to read a lot, but it's also important to well balance theory and practice, so I would advise to try as many applications as possible, at the same time read tutorials, theory white papers, etc... Then choose 1 or 2 programs where you want to invest some time.

When I "seriously" started to do fractals (although I do not think it's very serious to spend so much time on fractals! :)), I quickly tested, say, 15 different apps, and I chose 2 of the most popular : Apo and UF. I eventually bough UF because it was the one I preferred. I don't regret at all the cost of the licence, because I learned so much with UF. BTW, you can use UF even if you don't buy it and as long as you wish, you just won't be able to render images and videos to disk without watermarks (but you can still take screenshots, the only thing with screenshots is that you don't have the Antialias function to smooth pixel steps)

Chaospro is to me a kind of freeware copy of UF, with the addition of some functionalities, so I thought I could use it instead of UF before I decided to buy UF. But I found Chaospro was not stable enough : too many crashes, and a GUI not as optimized and intuitive as UF. Now I am addicted to Mandelbulb 3D. But there are still some very popular program I have tried less than 10 minutes, so lot of time to spent on fractals in the next years :):).

Regarding Mandelbulb/box tranformations (and zooms), I did tens of them, at the beginning with UF and now with M3D (+Virtualdub). Have a look at my Youtube channel and enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/user/bib993#p/u

Cheers
bib

Thanks for all the helpful tips guys!

I have some more questions: since you can specify the iterations in ChaosPro, why wouldn't it be able to go really deep? Is there a maximum amount of iterations it can do which prevents that? Seems like the 'depth' of the zooms would depend on the iterations in your fractal, if I understand these ideas correctly.

Also, a problem I have had with a couple zooms in ChaosPro is that for awhile it zooms fine and smooth, but then it starts getting jittery and instead of just zooming in at one direction, the 'camera' go crazy and zigzags all over the place. It's like it follows my directions to a point but gradually starts bouncing around. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Also I looked at some of those Mandelbulb and Mandelbox animations, those were just stunning! I would LOVE to make a nice long movie like that! How in the world did you guys do those things!?! I know I have a lot of catching up to do before I reach that point, but wow, I really want to try some of those!

Socratease, can you tell me exactly how you did that color cycle? I think something like that combined with a zoom would be really neat.

Again, thanks for the help everyone. I think I am off to a good start thanks to all your assistance! I will certainly do some more reading, but don't rest easy, because I am sure it won't be long before I am back with some more questions!

That was simple.  Just find an interesting place in your fractal, set a keyframe, then (in ChaosPro) press F7 (or click the colorful Palette Icon up top) to bring up the Palette Editor, and slide the slider on the bottom all the way to the other side!

Set another keyframe, drag it down a bit, and that's all.

As for Mandelbulb / Mandelbox Animations - they are no more complex than ChaosPro animations.  Just give it a try and you'll see what I mean.

Back to Chaos Pro - the camera is doing it's best to interpolate between keyframes.  If you made too many adjustments to the position between keyframes, it may guess wrong at what you wanted.  I suggest using more keyframes and not zooming too much between them.  That should tame the camera nicely.

And Deep Zooms involve LOTS of calculations.  Not all software uses the same Math Libraries, or implements them in the same way.  It is not merely the iterations - it is an inherent limit in the way ChaosPro does Math.  Something to do with the number of decimal places it can handle I think...  Not 100% sure of the exact reason, just that it takes some pretty Hoopy Math to handle the calculations when deep zooming.  Have you zoomed in deep enough in ChaosPro to see everything just go "blocky" no matter what you do?

That's the limit of it's ability.

Still - if you are trying to keep render times reasonable, then you may not want to zoom too deep at first.  TeamFresh just finished a "Trip To e228" zoom which runs 13 minutes and took 6 Months to render!!

Watch it here:  http://www.fractalforums.com/movies-showcase-%28rate-my-movie%29/trip-to-e228/

Thanks for the info!

I'll try that color cycling sometime on the weekend, I think it will be pretty cool in a zoom.

A question: instead of a deep zoom, do you think that a slow, color cycling zoom that doesn't go really deep will take a lot of time to render? Also, can ChaosPro anti-alias the animations it outputs into a .avi file?

Thanks!

Again, render time depends upon far too many factors to answer the question as stated.  I can say that color cycling does not add to the render time much unless the color palette used is extremely complex.


I STRONGLY suggest NOT rendering to avi!!!

Especially for longer animations.

Render an image sequence, and compile it in a video editor (VirtualDub is what I started with, and it's Free!).

Rendering to avi can be dangerous.  You can bog down your computer's memory near the end and lose everything.

Likewise a power failure - all work lost.

But if you render an image sequence, even in the event of a power failure - you still have what was created up to that point, and can just pick up from the last keyframe rendered!

And Anti-Aliasing does add to render times.

Tremendously if set too high!

Hmm, didn't know that about .avi's, thanks.

The only thing is, I don't know how to compile images for virtual dub, I'm sure it isn't difficult though. Can anyone point me to a tutorial or something about how to use that. I have never used these types of software before, the only media software I know how to use is audio stuff, not video stuff.

thanks!

with Vdub to set up an image sequence...
(I assume you have a folder with a numbered image/frame sequence inside)
1) click file and select "open video file"
2) ensure the check box on the bottom left hand side marked "automatically load liked segments" is checked
3) Now select the first frame. click "open" and all the other frames should have also now automatically imported into Vdub.
4) export in the chosen manner

give me a shout if you get stuck with number 4.

as for "last lights on" Yeah if I had pulled my finger out I could have knocked a month or two off of that  :fiery: still patience is definitely required for deep zooms at pretty much any resolution. :dink: past e16 its number crunching time. I think If I had Tried to do that at 1080 it would have taken around a year or two!!!  also even though it cant do deep zooms -- i started animating on chaos pro and I love it.
Love the fractal in the eye!
one thing I do love is the 3D engine. way cool for hight maps :) you can even animate them into movies. O0


oh yeah - Try Xaos out if you get the chance. works on any platform and has real time fractal zooming!!!

Thank you very much!

I will give virtualdub a try tomorrow evening, and let you know how it goes. I'll try out Xaos too.

Thanks!

ok, I tried making some animations in ChaosPro, using the separate pictures method instead of just making an .avi, but the problem I have sometimes is that it crashes after the first picture is rendered. It doesn't even complete one frame. Can anyone give me a tip on what could be going wrong?

That's the problem with Chaospro : too unstable :(

I have used UF thousands of hours, and it crashed maybe once or twice.
I have used Chaospro tens of hours, and it crashed.....every 30 minutes...

the fact chaos pro crashes all the time is the reason I stopped using it really. although it did teach me to save my work more often!!!!

I have rendered some animations successfully, like the escape time mandelbrots, in ChaosPro, but when I try to render my attractor things, like that 3d Sierpinski carpet box thing, it crashes right away. Sigh.

Anyway I am trying my hand at Xaos now, but I am having similar problems recording zooms that I had on ChaosPro. I am not rendering them yet, just recording them for now. Anyway, the problem is I will be recording a nice steady zoom, but when I play back the zoom, it seems to stop following the positions after a little bit in the zoom that I guided it with the mouse, and the screen just starts flashing a bunch of colors like it's going crazy. Can anyone tell me what is happening? Boy, I hate to sound so helpless! I wish this stuff would just work like I expect!

it could be your graphics card is not up to scratch. hard to say  :angry: Maybe you could try a different piece of software. Why not try out ultra fractal? :hmh: its similar to chaos pro and its stable. :angel1: I don't think its necessarily the best software out there :tease: - (that goes to mandelbulber/mandelbulb 3d in my humble opinion ::)) but you cant go wrong with it and it has some wicked tuts for you to learn all the features etc..... :dink: