Render problems

[Kevin Camp]

how big is the final file (in gb)? depending on the format of your drive, you may have a single file size limit of 2gb (i believe fat-32 is the format that limits to 2gb).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Peter Parlegreco]

Thanks Kevin for responding to my post.
I’m not 100% how big it’s going to be, but I’m pretty sure it will be over 2 gigs (I’m animating–so there all Photoshop files).
How can I check the format of my drive?

[Kevin Camp]

on the mac side, i’m pretty sure that you can see the format info using ‘get info’ from the file menu, using the disk utilities (applications>utilities) or from the system profile (apple menu>about this mac>more…).

for windows, i would think that any hardware profile tool would tell you the format…

you can test if this is the issue fairly easily though… set the render settings to render an image sequence instead of a single media file. that way no single file (frame) will be anywhere near 2gb. if it makes it through the render, then the format may be the problem, if it doesn’t make it then there is some other issue.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Peter Parlegreco]

I’m sorry Kevin, I’m not sure where to go to render an image sequence.

[Kevin Camp]

after adding the comp to the render queue (or choosing ‘make movie’) click the render settings. then, at the top of the settings, change format from quicktime to an image sequence (like png sequence).

also, when yo set the file path, make a new folder for the sequence to go in, or you’ll end up with a ton of individual images floating around in that folder.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Peter Parlegreco]

Thanks Kevin. It renders fine as an image sequence (using png).

I don’t have Quicktime Pro, only the regular version. Would that affect the rendering of HD size files?

[Kevin Camp]

[Peter Parlegreco] “I don’t have Quicktime Pro, only the regular version. Would that affect the rendering of HD size files?”

nope, qt pro just lets you save/convert file directly from qt… which is handy, but it doesn’t add functionality to other apps that use qt or qt based codecs/components.

it seems that the file size is the problem. it renders a half-frame-size file, no problem (that would be one quarter the the full size in mb/gb), and it renders full frame hd as an image sequence (so know file is larger than 5mb). my guess is that it is the format of the drive that is causing this problem.

you could go buy a new firewire dirve, make sure the format is ntfs. you shouldn’t run into file size limits with ntfs.

or you could render the final media as a compressed file. quicktime’s photo-jpeg, avid’s dnxhd (free from avid) or dvcprohd (if you have it) may get the file small enough to finish the render. to select either of those as the codec, in the queue, click the render settings, leave format as quicktime, but click the options button. from there choose the codec from the dropdown menu, there should be other settings you can choose within the codec to adjust the amount of compression. photo-jpeg, for example, has a slider to set ‘quality’; lower values create smaller file sizes.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Peter Parlegreco]

I have a FireWire Bus on my drive, with a speed of 400 Mb/sec. I don’t know if that makes any sense?

Thank you, I might give those other compression formats a try.

Again thanks for taking the time to help.

[Joey Foreman]

I seem to remember this being a bug in Quicktime 7.4.
Upgrade to 7.6 and this should go away.

[Peter Parlegreco]

I was looking into that, but I have the Panther OS (10.3.9) for Mac and I don’t think it supports Quicktime 7.6.