Working with image sequences

[byte_fx]

If you have original HD footage or a LightWave animation as a targa sequence, SpeedEDIT’s intelligent use of meta-data will give you immediate clip playback, in full resolution.

Does this mean what it seems to? That a Ligtwave animation can be rendered and saved as a sequnce of Targa frames then broght into SpeedEdit to actually create the animation?

If that is the case a big thumbs up - even if I normally save the frames as hdr's and then render out the anim in Lightwave as an avi or Quicktime anim. And from there to mpeg of some sort - that varies.

But the ability to go direct to mpeg from an image sequence would be better.

byte_fx

[Seattle-HotShot]

From what I have read, yes, you are correct. VT 4 has this feature, You could just play the folder of TGA files (assuming they were in sequence, etc). So, from what I read of SE, the same feature would probably also be in there. Hope so, right?

Does this mean what it seems to? That a Ligtwave animation can be rendered and saved as a sequnce of Targa frames then broght into SpeedEdit to actually create the animation?

If that is the case a big thumbs up - even if I normally save the frames as hdr's and then render out the anim in Lightwave as an avi or Quicktime anim. And from there to mpeg of some sort - that varies.

But the ability to go direct to mpeg from an image sequence would be better.

byte_fx

[Jim_C]

If the files are in sequential order it treats a folder of them like a sequence.
Or even if you just drop the first one on the timeline it does.

This has actually been a a little glitch for some of us, because sometimes you have a tga you just want to act like a still but if it has a number after the name VT will think it is a sequence and shifts conditions to treat it as such.

A toggle on/off for tga sequences has been a request a couple times.

(All VT4 speak tho)

[KTVA]

Okay, I am becoming frustrated and it is my fault, I am sure.

I just purchased 3D Arsenal and am now learning LightWave on my VT4.5.

I have fumbled through just about every hurdle, except now when I render to a targa sequence, it will not play in the VT timeline, it just sees it as a still, it will not play when I mouse over it, it just says "still image." Now this is only in the last 4 hours or so, prior to that, it worked fine. The ones produced earlier today work fine, but everything in the last several hous will not, or I can totally power-down reboot the whole system, render a new sequence and the new sequence will properly, but when I try to do it again, the next one won't!

I have been removing the old rendered files each time I render a new version.

What did I screw-up? I know I must have accidentally changed a setting.

[Seattle-HotShot]

I ran into something like this last month. My problem was that my file names for my TGA sequence had a number in front of the name. For example I had scene 01 or something, so my file name was 01_car_0001.tga, then 0002, etc. Don't quote me on the specifics, but if I remember correctly, the leading number messed me up. If you can do a quick test with some different naming methods, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. Someone on another list also mentioned that if you go car010001 then VT or SE will think there might be 10,000 files, and it will crash trying to find them all, when you only actually had from 001 to 100 files in your sequence. In other words, it counted all the numbers in your sequence, so it tried to use them.

Hope that gets you going in the right direction. Once you figure it out, write yourself a note. I promise eventually you'll make the same mistake again and you'll be kicking yourself! Its an easy way to lose an afternoon!

Carlin

[KTVA]

RegardingTarga sequence not playing.

Thank you for your reply.

Hey, I think I figured it out. I believe with the 100 times LightWave crashed that I accidentally, when reloading everything, loaded the .jpg versus the .tga for the Image/Reflections/standard reflection file. And then when I saved my setting, it would just releoad that .jpg. I think this is what happened anyway, because when I used a different effect today and LightWave requested the reflection image map, I noticed it said ".tga" and then noticed that the two files are named virtually the same thing. This really is a 3D Arsenal issue, because that is where the assets reside. Targa sequence now plays correctly. A work-around was to load into VT [4} then render as targa sequence with "alpha" checked.