November 20, 2015, 04:04:04 pm
I would like to propose a simple checkbox in the movie export window that would allow the frames to be dumped as a jpg/bmp/tga sequence.
Why: I'm using the 5.3 demo and it, unfortunately, crashes a lot on my system (could be my drivers, but not very important, I'm sure newer versions will be better). I had a nice animation test setup and on 99% of my render it did a blue screen and died. I'm seeing Lumion uses FFmpeg to build the MP4 and my guess is it uses some memory stream to feed FFmpeg the footage, as I can't seem to find some temp dir which Lumion uses to render to and then compile afterwards.
But after the crash the animation is lost, and a rerender is needed. 10 minutes lost is no big problem, but what if I render all night on a big scene, only to find it crashed at 75% at 4am. I understand it causes huge files (I'm used to that) but 75% of my render was still useable, and I could even resume.
The mechanism to save a single image is already build into Lumion, so that should not be a problem, to me it would be an extra checkbox on the render animation tab, and it could just render the files to the same folder using the same name. If you have movie_a_flyby.mp4 the sequence would be movie_a_flyby0001.tif (etc).
Hope this makes sense! Together with the camera import request it would work very well in a 3D composite pipeline. Because right now it means we need to decompile the MP4 to a image sequence and that implies a quality loss. We always want to obtain the highest possible pixel quality.
Thanks for reading!
-Johan