CompuServe Messages

The rendering system in Imagine makes a lot of sense if you thing about it. You start a New rendering subproject and get the requester to set your resolution. You can modify the subproject and reset the resolution or start a New subproject. This way you can have one project rendered in lo-res scanline and have another project in hi-res trace for your final animation. I've been using DCTV with Imagine for quite a while. If you're short on HD space it makes more sense to render to DCTV. Imagine writes a 24 bit file to the DCTV.library which converts it to a DCTV image and stores it to the disk. The DCTV files are a lot smaller than the 24 bit files would be so you can save a lot of hard drive space doing this. For some animations you can save a lot of time by rendering lo-res 24 bit images and converting them to DCTV. (Imagine can't save lo-res DCTV images) Playback speed can also be a consideration. I often render 24 bit images and convert them to DCTV in Overscan-lace-4 bit, then Overscan-no-lace-4 bit, then Overscan-no-lace-3 bit. Since I'm starting with a hi-res 24 bit image I can just keep decreasing the quality of the DCTV images till I get decent playback speed without re-rendering. The only advantage of using the Imagine movie format is that you can loop certain parts of the anim. For instance: You've modeled a torando and you want to do an anim of the camera backing away from it. You make the anim 400 frames. The first 200 are of the torando spinning and the second 200 are of the camera backing away. Render as an Imagine movie and edit the text file to make the first 200 frames loop 5 times then play the last 200. This way you get a good look at the torando before the camera backs away. You get an effective playback of 1200 frames but you only had to render 400. :^)