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Manual - Blender 2.43

[edit] Output Formats

[edit] Description

The output format for either single image renders (RENDER F12 + F3 save image) or for Animations ANIM CtrlF12 is selected using the Format Panel. From here you can select many image or animation formats (Image and animations formats.).

There are many image formats out there for many different uses. A format stores an image in a lossless or lossy format; with lossy formats you suffer some image degredation but save disk space because the image is saved using fewer bytes. A lossless format preserves the image exactly, pixel for pixel. You can break formats down into static images and movie clips. Within either category there are standards (static formats and clip codecs) which may be proprietary standards (developed and controlled by one company), or open standards (which are community or consortium-controlled). Open standards generally outlive any one particular company and will always be royalty-free and freely obtained by the viewer. Proprietary formats may only work with a specific video card, or while the codec may be free, the viewer may cost.

[edit] Format Panel

Image Format options.

By default the dimensions SizeX and SizeY are 800×600 and can be changed as for any Num Button by shift-clicking into the field. These buttons control the overall size of the image. Just below are two more settings, AspX and AspY which control the packing of the pixels along the respective axis. Together, the four buttons below define the viewing size and aspect ratio of the image. Aspect is the ratio between the X and Y dimensions of the pixel of the image. By default it is 1:1 since computer screen pixels are square. If television shorts are being made, and since TV pixels are not square, you want to change this aspect ratio to match the destination video standard: PAL for Europe, and NTSC for the Americas.

[edit] Presets

To make life easier the rightmost block of buttons provide some common presets:

• PAL - 720×576 pixels at 54:51 aspect ratio.
• NTSC - 720×480 pixels at 10:11 aspect ratio.
• Default - Same as PAL, but with full TV options, as explained in the following sections.
• Preview - 640×512 at 1:1 aspect ratio. This setting automatically scales down the image by 50%, to effectively produce a 320×256 image.
• PC - 640×480 at 1:1 aspect ratio.
• PAL 16:9 - 720×576 at 64:45 aspect ratio, for 16:9 wide screen TV renderings.
• PANO - Standard panoramic settings 576×176 at 115:100 aspect ratio. More about 'panoramic' renderings in the pertinent section.
• FULL - 1280×1024 at 1:1 aspect ratio.
• HD - Maximus Pixelus. With a 16:9 aspect ratio and checking in at a full 1920×1080 resolution for every frame, this is the ultimate format, with over 2 million pixels to compute for every frame. Bassam says to "Grab a cup of coffee while you wait, but the results are spectacular." You can also set format to 1280x720 30 fps to get HD 720p flavor. Check the Even Interlacing button for the "i" variety of 1080/720, thus giving support for all HighDef varieties.

These are just the presets; you can set any resolution you wish, subject to your PC's memory restrictions; see the Render page for ideas and techniques and tools for enabling huge render outputs.

[edit] Options

Image and animations formats.

Blender supports a wide mix of image formats. Some formats are produced by internal Blender code. Others (Tiff, for example) may require a dynamic load library (such as libtiff.dll) in your Blender installation folder. In alphabetical order they are (bold indicates a movie clip format):

• AVI Raw - Audio-Video Interlaced (AVI) uncompressed frames.
• AVI Jpeg - AVI but with Jpeg compression. Lossy, smaller files but not as small as you can get with a Codec compression algorithm. Jpeg compression is also the one used in the DV format used in the digitals camcorders.
• AVI Codec - AVI codec compression. Available codecs are operating system dependant. When an AVI codec is initially chosen, the codec dialog is automatically launched. The codec can be changed directly using the Set Codec button which appears (AVI Codec settings.).
• BMP Bit-Mapped Paint lossless format used by early paint programs.
• Cineon - format produced by a Kodak Cineon camera and used in high-end graphics software and more directed toward digital film.
• DPX - Digital Moving-Picture eXchange format; an open professional format (close to Cineon) that also contains metainformation about the picture; 16-bit uncompressed bitmap (huge file size). Used in preservation.
• Frameserver - Blender puts out frames upon request as part of a render farm. The port number is specified in the OpenGL User Preferences panel.
• HamX - Blender's own self-developed 8 bits RLE (Run Length Encoded bitmap) format; it creates extremely compact files that can be displayed quickly. To be used only for previsualization of animations (Play button).
• Iris - the standard Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) format used on those spanking Unix OS machines.
• Jpeg - Joint Picture Expert Group (name of the consortium which defined it), an open format that supports very good compression with little loss of quality. Only saves RGB value. Re-saving images results in more and more compression and loss of quality.
• MultiLayer - an OpenEXR format that supports storing multiple layers of images together in one file. Each layer stores a renderpass, such as shadow, specularity, color, etc. You can specify the encoding used to save the MulitLayer file using the codec selector (ZIP (lossless) is shown and used by default).
• OpenEXR - an open and non-proprietary extended and highly dynamic range (HDR) image format, saving both Alpha and Z-depth buffer information.

• Enable the Half button to use 16-bit format; otherwise 32-bit floating point precision color depth will be used
• Enable the Zbuf button to save the Z-buffer (distance from camera) info
• Choose a compression/decompression CODEC (ZIP by default) to save disk space.
• Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.
• Because OpenEXR is so new and previews are generally not supported by Operating Systems, enable Preview to save a JPG image along with the EXR image so you can quickly and easily see what the basic image looks like.

• PNG - Portable Network Graphics, a standard meant to replace old GIF inasmuch as it is lossless, but supports full true colour images. Supports Alpha channel.

Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.

• Radiance HDR - a High Dynamic Range image format that can store images with big changes in lighting and color.
• TARGA and Targa raw - Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter is a simple raster graphics format established in 1984 and used by the original IBM PC's. Supports Alpha Channel.

Enable the RGBA button to save the Alpha channel.

• TIFF - Often used for teletype and facsimile (FAX) images
• QuickTime - Apple's Quicktime .mov file. The Quicktime codec dialog is displayed when this codec is installed and this format is initially chosen.

[edit] Compression

Some formats can compress the image to use less disk space. This compression might be lossless (PNG, ...) or lossy (Jpeg, ...). Lossy formats don't store individual pixel information, thus reducing image quality. All the other formats are more or less equivalent, each having advantages and disadvantages. Make your compression selection using the button or field located beneath the format selector. For example, if Jpeg is selected, you can specify a compression level (Quality:90 by default). Higher quality takes more disk space, but results in a better looking picture with less compression encoding artifacts.

The default image type is Targa, but, since the image is stored in a buffer and then saved, it is possible to change the image file type after the rendering and before saving using this menu. (attention: this is only valid for static images, not when rendering animations!).

[edit] Channels

Blender renders color (RGB) images, but Black and White (BW) and color with Alpha Channel (RGBA) are also possible. Beware, unless the Extensions button of the Output pannel is set, Blender does not automatically add the extension to files, hence any .tga or .png extension must be explicitly written in the File Save window.

If the option "RGBA" is specified, standard colour number '0' is used as the transparent colour. The format MUST support an alpha channel as part of its specifcation; for example, if you choose a Jpeg format (whose specifcation does not support alpha transparency), clicking RGBA will not magically add an alpha channel; it will be saved as RGB only.

OpenEXR and Multilayer formats are the only formats that store Z-depth buffer information. Multilayer is the only format that stores Render Layer and Render Passes as channels that can then be composited in post-production.

Blender reads and writes (Amiga) IFF, Targa, (SGI) Iris and CDinteractive (CDi) RLE colormap formats. Specify the colormap file in the Output FType field.

[edit] Frame Rate

For an animation the frame rate (AVI Codec settings.) which, by default, is 25 frames per second, the standard for PAL (European) television. Use 30 frames per second for USA television.

[edit] Codec

AVI Codec settings.

A Codec is a little routine that compresses the video so that it will fit on a DVD, or be able to be streamed out over the internet, over a cable, or just be a reasonable file size. Codecs compress the channels of a video down to save space and enable continuous playback. Lossy codecs make smaller files at the expense of image quality. Some codecs, like H.264, are great for larger images. Codecs are used to encode and decode the movie, and so must be present on both the encoding machine (Blender) and the target machine. The results of the encoding are store in a container file.

Blender knows two kinds of container files:

• Audio Video Interlace (a .avi extension) and
• QuickTime (a .mov extension).

When AVI Codec is selected, Blender will popup a little Codec selector window, listing the codecs that are registered on your machine. Each Codec has unique configuration settings. Consult the documentation on the codec (supplied by the company that wrote it) for more information.

When Quicktime is selected, the codecs on your machine will pop-up and allow you to pick which one you want to use. You may have to have purchased Quicktime Pro to use this.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of codecs, including XviD, H.264, DivX, Microsoft, and so on. Each has advantages and disadvantages and compatibiliity with different players on different operating systems.

Most codecs can only compress the RGB or YUV color space, but some support the Alpha channel as well. Codecs that support RGBA include:

• animation (quicktime)
• PNG *TIFF *Pixlet - not lossless, and may be only available on Apple Mac.
• [Lagarith Lossless Video Codec]

More information on image formats can be found at:

• http://www.cineon.com/
• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/

[edit] Interlacing

Interlacing is a way of providing a sort of motion blur with compression. Instead of capturing the full resolution image every so many times a second, half of the horizontal scan lines are captured twice the number of times a second. So, instead of displaying 1280x720 images 25 times a second, which is called HD 720p EU, you could display 1280x360 images 50 times a second, where the first frame is the even scan lines (horizontal rows 2, 4, 6, 8 ...) and the second frame is set 1/50th of a second later consisting of the odd scan lines (rows 1, 3, 5, 7,...). The net result is that the same number of pixels are displayed every second, but the interlaced variety will appear smoother, since the odd lines catch any movement that happened in between the even frames, and vice versa. Blender supports Even interlacing (described above, used for EU TV) and Odd interlacing, for US TV, where the first frame is scan lines (1, 3, 5, 7 ...) and the frame after is the even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, ...). Use the Even/Odd buttons for this purpose.

[edit] Frame Rate

Additionally, Blender supports 50 or 60, or 24 or 30 frames per second. 50 and 25 fps are used for EU TV, and 60 and 30 are US, and 24 is film. Because of US Power Grid cycles, the actual frame rate is 29.97 fps. To accommodate this, Blender has a divider for the frame rate field; enter 30 fps and a divider of 1.001 to get exactly 29.97 fps.

[edit] FFMPEG

FFMPEG, short for Fast Forward Moving Pictures Expert Group, is a collection of free and open source software libraries that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library.

When you select FFMPEG as your output format, two more tabs appear that allow you to select the video codec and the audio codec.

[edit] FFMPEG Video

Here you choose which video codec you want to use, and compression settings. With all of these compression choices, there is a tradeoff between filesize, compatibility across platforms, and playback quality. You can use the presets, DV, SVCD, DVD, etc. which choose optimum settings for you for that type of output, or you can manually select the format (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, Quicktime (if installed), DV, H.264, or Xvid (if installed). You must have the proper codec installed on your computer for Blender to be able to call it and use it to compress the video stream.

If your video is HUGE and exceeds 2Gig, enable Autospilt Output. The main control over output filesize is the GOP, or keyframe interlace. A higher number generally leads to a smaller file, but needs a higher-powered device to replay it.

[edit] FFMPEG Audio

Audio is encoded using the codec you choose, as long as you enable Multiplex Audio. For each codec, you may be able to control the bitrate (quality) of the sound in the movie. This example shows MP3 encoding at 128kbps. Higher bitrates are bigger files that stream worse but sound better. Stick to powers of 2 for compatibility.

[edit] Free Advice

Choosing which format to use depends on what you are going to do with the image. If you are going to

• email it to your friends, use JPG
• combine it with other images in post processing and simple color/alpha composition, use PNG
• use nodes to simulate depth of field and blurring, use EXR
• composite using Render Passes, such as the Vector pass, use Multilayer.

If you are animating a movie and are not going to do any post-processing or special effects on it, use either AVI-JPEG or AVI Codec and choose the XviD open codec. If you want to output your movie with sound that you have loaded into the VSE, use FFMPEG.

If you are going to do post-processing on your movie, it is best to use a frame set rendered as PNG images; if you only want one file, then choose AVI Raw. While AVI Raw is huge, it preserves the exact quality of output for the post-processing. After post-processing (compositing and/or sequencing), you can compress it down. You don't want to post-process a compressed file, because the compression artifacts might throw off what you are trying to accomplish with the post-processing.

Note that rendering an animation long to calculate in a unique file (AVI or QuickTime) is more risky than in a set of static images: if a problem occurs while rendering, you have to re-render all from the beginning, while with static images, you can restart the rendering from the place (the frame) where the problem occurred!

[edit] Checking Render Results

When Blender renders an image, it saves it in an internal buffer. To see the latest render, change one of your panes to a UV/Image Editor. In the IM: Image selector, select Render Result, and the window will display the latest render. To the right of the Image selector, you can also select a RenderLayer to view, and, if you have render passes enabled, the results of a specific pass.

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