General Question About Animating in UltraFractal

[Sockratease]

OK, so I finally broke down and bought Ultra Fractal.

I have no idea if I am doing something wrong, or if the programmer missed the point of rendering an kmage sequence instead of a video file.

I had a test running all night, and not a single frame rendered!

Then, when it finally finished "calculating" - all 500 frames appeared at once.

I must be missing something.

I have to be!!

Because if not...

There is no polite way to say this, so here goes...

Doesn't Freddy realize that rendering an image sequence is supposed to done 1 frame at a time??

The idea is to save ram, but if it needs to render them all to ram before producing a single image, memory issues will quickly arise.

PLEASE tell me I just misunderstood the manual!!

I may not be able to use this program for the purpose I bought it if it can't render one frame at a time!!

How else can one interrupt a sequence and restart as needed??

I really hope I didn't waste my money...  this is not cheap software!

I couldn't find any place on their site to ask other than email, so I'm asking here.  Plus - it will give me a chance to calm down and phrase myself better if I need to write directly   

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[bib]

Unfortunately I'm not sure you can produce images one by one. However you can backup/restore a rendering job.

[David Makin]

Ultra Fractal renders to avi 1 frame at a time (actually in fact blocks of a frame at a time) to its own format first and then, once the render is finished, converts to the encoding you have selected.
If you prefer single frames then simply select a static image format as output instead of avi e.g. png or tiff or even jpg.

[bib]

If you prefer single frames then simply select a static image format as output instead of avi e.g. png or tiff or even jpg.

I don't think Sockratease will be happy to launch individually the rendering of thousands of images...
When you select jpg format when rendering an animation, it will produce individual frames, but these will saved to disk at the end of the job, not on the fly.

[Sockratease]

Thanks for the replies.

I have 9,000 frames - so 1 at a time is out of the question!

I just heard that it renders individual frames to a temp folder, then moves them all when the job is done.

If those frames remain after interrupting an animation, I can move them manually - then restart from where I left off.

Otherwise, I am compelled to attempt to return this program!!  (I expect that wont go down well - but as an experienced animator using many different programs, not just fractal generators, I have to say that this is the first time I ever encountered such poor thinking in software design!).

[cKleinhuis]

they are actually saved somewhere in the users/documents folder, i think i have found them some time,
but i do not know where to search, and how they are named

this is what annoyed me earlier !

but the program is managing the states very good, and you can easilly cut down your computer, and restart the
program, it will continue where it left

and you can have more than one render job at a time

[bib]

and you can have more than one render job at a time

and stop/restart them as you wish. But I agree with Sockratease that it's quite annoying you can't stop an animation job in the middle and save the result to disk. For example if you realize that your deep zoom will take far more longer than expected, either you cancel it, or you wait for months...You can't just look at what has already been calculated.

UF is a great program in many aspects, so I guess we'll have to live with this limitation.

[Sockratease]

Stuff like this is why I hate so-called State of The Art software.

It got so bad with adobe that I refuse to have *any* of their software on my computers!!  None of it.

We should not "have to live with" idiocy, no matter how great the rest of the software is!

Freddy will be getting a polite letter from me - after I calm down enough to be polite   

If I wrote it now, I would surely be too abusive to be taken seriously.  This defeats the entire reason for rendering image sequences as opposed to video files 

I honestly feel like I just flushed $130 down the toilet.

I have had the demo in the past, and saw nothing in UF that surpassed ChaosPro - which is free, so I stuck with that!!  The only advantage seems to be deep zooming.

If this was under $50, I'd feel it was worth it - but it doesn't even handle 3D!!

Don't worry. I'll get over it, and calm down before writing to express my grievances.

But I will write.

And even though I know it will never happen (and understand why), I'll be requesting a refund.  Rendering Animations is disabled in the demo, so I had no way of foreseeing this and therefore feel I am entitled to a refund in spite of the obvious (and valid!) reasons for them to deny me one.

[cKleinhuis]

and you can have more than one render job at a time

and stop/restart them as you wish. But I agree with Sockratease that it's quite annoying you can't stop an animation job in the middle and save the result to disk. For example if you realize that your deep zoom will take far more longer than expected, either you cancel it, or you wait for months...You can't just look at what has already been calculated.

UF is a great program in many aspects, so I guess we'll have to live with this limitation.

to be honest, i actually have a deep mandelbulb zoom, and i am going very deep, but i think the
resulting movie will be much too fast ... but some statistics:

current rendering time 800 Hours ( on a 2.2 mhz 4 core system )
and it say there are 60 more hours to go

but perhaps i have made the deepest mandelbulb zoom ever when finished

i dunno how ultrafractal deals with the formulas, because i know that the formula used
in the movie has been updated several times ...

[bib]

Stuff like this is why I hate so-called State of The Art software.

It got so bad with adobe that I refuse to have *any* of their software on my computers!!  None of it.

We should not "have to live with" idiocy, no matter how great the rest of the software is!

Freddy will be getting a polite letter from me - after I calm down enough to be polite  

If I wrote it now, I would surely be too abusive to be taken seriously.  This defeats the entire reason for rendering image sequences as opposed to video files  

I honestly feel like I just flushed $130 down the toilet.

I have had the demo in the past, and saw nothing in UF that surpassed ChaosPro - which is free, so I stuck with that!!  The only advantage seems to be deep zooming.

If this was under $50, I'd feel it was worth it - but it doesn't even handle 3D!!

Don't worry. I'll get over it, and calm down before writing to express my grievances.

But I will write.

And even though I know it will never happen (and understand why), I'll be requesting a refund.  Rendering Animations is disabled in the demo, so I had no way of foreseeing this and therefore feel I am entitled to a refund in spite of the obvious (and valid!) reasons for them to deny me one.

Yes, obviously you have to calm down

If I'm correct, reading another post about the need for a Mandelbrot animation by an indepedent film maker, you invested in the UF licence because there was a potential return on invetsment, so it's not flushed down to the toilet

You talk about Adobe software you refuse to install, in my case it's Apple

I don't know Chaospro in details, I've started to play withh it but soon gave up because I felt it was a copy of UF (yes, with some extra features, but also less usability). And honestly, yes it's free, but it's SO UNSTABLE ! After a few hours playing with it, I was fed up with the tens of crashes. The nice thing is that Martin Pfingstl (Chaospro author) replies very quickly to e-mails

On the other hand I've been using UF for hundreds (thousands?) of hours with not more than 2 or 3 crashes ! 100€ is the price of stability. And UF handles 3D of course : I used UF for almost all my Mandelbuld renderings.

Finally I agree that you should ask for a refund if the product does not match your expectations.

[bib]

but perhaps i have made the deepest mandelbulb zoom ever when finished

deeper than this one?
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/-SSQMc3yu2k&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/-SSQMc3yu2k&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

[cKleinhuis]

@bib nice camera path , but i think YES, 800hours of rendering a straight zoom have to be deeper

but as i said, i believe it is going to be also the FASTEST animation to the deepest mandelbulb spot ever

and i do hope, that something nice comes out, because i changed the formula while rendering, i hope
it has no cracks in it, fast would be ok, 1000 frames ....

[bib]

Thanks fot the camera path! As you have played with David's formula, you know that's not easy, that's probably why you did a straight zoom

Regarding the change of formula during the render I think that should be OK. I guess UF keeps the original formula. That would me more annoying if you had updated codecs during the rendering.

Edit : 800 hours seems quite long. Espceially if the zoom is going to be very fast, we won't see the details, so you could have increased the Solid Threshold and decreased the Accuracy. What value did you use?

For example the green animation below took several days to render whereas this one only a few hours :
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/h0WOf7wOMRY&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/h0WOf7wOMRY&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

[cKleinhuis]

i increeased ( or decreased ) the treshold to ... 1E-7 at least i think
but i dunno really, lets wait some more days

[David Makin]

Ultra Fractal saves the formula used as part of the render job, so it doesn't matter what happens to the original formula file as far as a disk render is concerned - in fact in the past some people have recovered lost formulas from render job files