Video formats for Material?

[Bullit]

What video formats for materials are accepted? For example i don't see wmv or mpg in the options.

[NNois]

picture/video formats accepted are thoses accepted by the renderer, so what renderer are you using ?

[Bullit]

Default, Mentalray.

[mattmos]

You can use video but in my experience it leads to instability (when scrubbing for example), particularly if the compression technique is optimised by multiple frame sampling eg h264. Best option is to convert to an image sequence really.

[Rork]

What Matt says.

And also keep in mind that Softimage (and 64 bit Windows) uses just a small subset of video codecs. (Most codecs are still 32bit and cannot be used by 64bit apps by default)
All this can go to hell quickly when rendering on a farm and codecs aren't installed everywhere......

Stick with image sequences ;-)

[Bullit]

Ok thanks, but my experience with 3dsMax 64bit has not this kind of issues.

[Rork]

Don't know about 3dsmax, but besides some Adobe applications, 32bit codecs will normally not show up in a 64bit application.
I think there's some coding trickery involved to 'see' these codecs.

And be honest, 3dsmax will use anything on your pc. If that's a good thing I'll leave it up to you ;-)

[Bullit]

Yes that might be a problem if the PC is crapped with codecs conflicts, but it is rare in workplaces.

[luceric]

the answer is only avi and quicktime, but you should already know that by looking at the file dialog to import images.

[Bullit]

Btw 3ds Max uses same render engine so this must not be due to that.
Edit: and Softimage is so "Microsofted" that is strange that wmv isn't accepted.

[luceric]

softimage (or maya, afaik) uses the old Video For Windows API, not DirectShow or Windows Media. So it only supports .avi and single pass codecs. Max is much more up to date with windows APIs.

the renderer doesnt implement video textures. when you use a video texture, XSI read the image for that frame and copies it to mental ray. if you export an .mi2 file, the texture image for that frame will be inlined in that .mi2 file, resulting in a huge, but otherwise totally valid, file.

[Rork]

Not sure on this, but I think 3dsmax has even more 'hooks' into Windows than Softimage.
3dsmax was written on the latest and greatest SDK at that time for Windows, making use of every new feature.
That's why you don't see a Linux version, not even a MainWin one. Ot that's my theory anways ;-)

[Bullit]

Thanks for explanation luceric. Would be a a big or not big effort to change this?

[luceric]

It would be about 6 man weeks to add DirectShow/ActiveMovie to Softimage (windows only, obviously). there is nothing technically that really prevents it. in the mean time Quicktime should work pretty well.

[pezetko]

What's benefit of having support or even using any movie format like avi, wmv or even any quicktime for textures?

[Bullit]

Thanks luceric.

For example not have to do a conversion. You take it from a video camera and just use it.

Btw i am not certain but i believe this is related also to the videos that netview and imageclip viewer limitation have. For example one of ways to do a tutorial if you don't have a second display could be just put the tutorial video in one of viewports, but due to format limitations that usually can't be done.