Welcome Rosie, I'm sure you will like it here!
Socratease, thank you for your explanation to Rosie. I'm glad I got answers even on questions I didn't ask
I'm not that far yet but thank you for your input. Didn't know about the gif for example, thought it would be jpeg. So it's a bit the same as Chaoscope I think, except than you use a second programme like Ani4chaoscope to render the fractals first after you set them to images. This is more direct I guess. I'm gonna give it a try this week. Won't bother you with the result though
Have a nice day!
Yes, like Ani4Chaoscope you end up with an image sequence.
Many other animation programs and nearly all Professional 3D Software do this.
When rendering a video file there is a lot of RAM overhead for codecs and compression and writing headers and even etc! Image sequences are best because you can use them at any frame rate, they render with more security (like if a blackout occurs you can just pick up where the last frame ended) (or if you happen to be rendering a long sequence you can preview, start preliminary compositions, and most importantly spot errors of things like camera path WHILE the rest of the sequence is still rendering!) (UNLESS you're stuck with UltraFractal which refuses to give even the first image until all images have been rendered
- Yes, I will never forgive UF for that until it Finally gets corrected!!).
So by leaving the video compiling for after the images are done, you have much more control and a pristine source to render as many ways as you like until things like file size vs image quality of the finished video are optimized. If you render a deep zoom to a video, then are unhappy with the compression, you must re-render everything (recompressing already compressed video creates horrible artifacts and bad quality - just look at what happens on youtube and other video hosts!). Whereas if you render an image sequence to video and are unhappy with the compression, you still have the frames and just need to recompile the video from the frames. Since rendering the fractal image frames takes the longest it is silly to have to do that more than once.
Edit : Also, using image sequences simplifies adding things like titles, credits, special effects, and transitions to and from other clips.