#PAR trouble, bug?
17 messages in this thread
I just experienced some difficulty in converting TGA files to the PAR.
I kept getting an error message: Incompatible or corrupted file
format. I could view the files in the PAR OK and nothing seemed to
be wrong but they just wouldn't create the ani file. Rebooting did
not help. I had 675 meg open on the drive. I could transfer to
stills but not ani. All I got was a 1 frame ani before the error
message came up and aborted the operation. As a last resort I decided
to optimize the drive and after this optimizing the 300 frame
animation converted without problems.
Thought you would like to add this to your troubleshooting guide.
Don't ask me to explain it. I don't know why the weird error message
and why it was fixed by the optimize. Would have been simpler if the
error message would just suggest optimizing the drive rather than
telling me I had corrupted or incompatible files. Maybe this is a
bug in the software's error messages.
Don,
I've experienced something similar but not quite the same. I needed
to decompress an ANI into TGA's and then when I wanted to recompile
them as an ANI, I got full screen scrambled digital images. I checked
them out as TGA's and they were all scrambled. Apparently, even
though this ANI was fine on the PAR drive when I converted it to
TGA's it wasn't making the conversion properly. I've tried several
things to no avail. In the past optimizing the drive has worked with
some things, but not this time. Images are field recorded, and I
tried unload just individual fields but to no luck. I ended up
re-rendering the sequence because I needed to do some transitions.
Got ANY ideas! Anyway thanks for the tip.
I've contacted Sony re: the FXE-100, they're sending literature. Once I get it,
the Sony rep will schedule a demo. I'll let you know.
-JE
I have yet to try to convert from ani to tga as I always render to tga's first
then convert. It's probably due to my untrusting nature and if I render for 10
hours with 4 slaves tied up I don't want a single file to deal with. I like
being able to just rerender one or two frames to correct any minor problems.
Something about decompressing and then recompressing back to ani to do this fix
doesn't sit well with me and the artifacts issue. Hard drive space is not an
issue here because I have ample so I just stick to rendering the old fashion
way. I am concerned that the error messages in the PAR.exe could be a little
more accurate, though. I hope Dave White is following these threads so he can
report these little problems back to his software people. They seem to be
quite responsive when they know about a problem. I am still impressed how they
wrote a 5 second preroll for me.
Hard drive space isn't really an issue either but when you've got
alot of seperate elements and animations floating around, I find it
more manageable to have them in ani format. However, if that is only
going to work for final output, it compounds the problem. I need to
be able to do tests and try different combinations. The key word here
is tests. I'm not concerned about what happens with artifacting as a
result, but being able to recomposite etc. I can fill up 4 gigs
easily. Its still comes down to file management and what works best.
I find ani files easier to deal with and mostly haven't had a problem
but I have had some. I think the stability issue of these files
needs to be addressed. Not to discount what DPS has done but the
pre-roll thing was the result of changing 1 byte. <g> Not a big
challenge.
You definitly are doing things that push the PAR implementation. I
use the PAR for tests, too but not as much as you. eg. I just
completed a 540 frame animation using 9 VP entries requiring 6 of
them to be animated layers with alpha. ( I have a question for you
on that process, later) After 14 hours of having all four machines
rendering I was missing frame 470. It got corrupted some how. I
believe this would have brought your PAR setup down but by rendering
to the tga's I was able to just fix the one frame and then transfer
to the PAR. For test purposes I can see sacrificing the quality
factor in transfering the ani to tga. As I become more comfortable
with working with the PAR, I might try your approach. I am looking
forward to seeing the new ver 2.0 of the PAR.exe. I hope they have
more file handling and selection capabilities.
>> You're definitely doing things that push the PAR implementation. <<
Of course, would you expect any less from me?. <g> I imagine you are
too especially with all the rotoscoping you've be doing, which is
partly why I'd asked if you'd had any problem converting from ANI to
TGA as I expected that if you were converting those file to TGA you
might have encoutenered a similar situation. Its not quite the same
as rendering to the PAR and then converting them back but not too
different.
>> I am looking forward to seeing the new ver 2.0 of the PAR.exe. I
hope they have more file handling and selection capabilities. <<
I am too. I would also like to be able when converting from an ANI to
TGA to have the images come back at the same resolution they were
rendered at, rather than the 752×480. This may not be practical but
it would be nice.
John:
To change the resolution of the files, you can just take them from the PAR to
your hard disk with another program which will scale them to whatever you want.
Image Alchemy comes to mind, and will do the scaling as it copies them.
Greg Pyros
If you render to the PAR at say 320×200 and then convert them back to
TGA's they have to be cropped, not rescaled. Rescaling could be done
in VP for that matter.
JE:
I see what you are trying to do now. Try PICLAB.EXE (freeware here on CIS) to
both crop and/or change aspect ratio. Remember that Gus' driver places a
smaller image exactly in the center of the screen, so it shouldn't be difficult
to calculate the crop points.
Greg Pyros
Thanks Greg, I'll check it out.
>Not to discount what DPS has done but the pre-roll thing was the result of
changing 1 byte.
> <g> Not a big challenge.
But that was a REALLY BIG BYTE!
Dave
DPS
David,
>> But that was a REALLY BIG BYTE! <<
Aren't they all?! <g>
-JE
Don, I can help you on this one. The problem is that the file name has the
same prefix as a file on the PAR but not in sequence. Normally, the PAR will
append files of the same name if the frame sequence is contiguous. The fix is
simple, just rename the file on the PAR drive and it will copy on without
problem. There is some mention of this in the manual but it isn't too clearly
written.
Michael B.
Not sure you understand the problem here.
First of all the par will indeed copy all files within a dos directory
that are selected. They arrange themselves in alpha – numeric order
for the *.ani sequence. In fact, I'm doing just that, right now.
The original problem I had was that a sequence of tga's would not
copy to the PAR drive converting to *.ani until after I optimized the
PAR drive. My comment was that the bug in this case was in the
content of the error message that popped up informing me that the
file type (*.tga) was not supported or was corrupted. It should have
stated that the PAR drive need optimizing to provide the contiguous
space to perform the transfer. Since the transfer was being made to
a new project directory there were no names to be changed if this
were a problem.
I have had that same error message but the only fix I had needed was
the name change. In your case it sounds like you do need to optimize
or create more disk space. Optimizing is usually a pretty quick
order and I use it frequently when joining files. Although, it sorts
feels like I am walking on thin ice sometimes. See my message,
"Ouch, Beware" for some cautions regarding backups and restores on
the PAR. As for transferring to a different project directory, I
haven't tried that yet, assuming that it wouldn't work per statements
in the manual. I fully agree with you that the feedback from the PAR
software could be better.
Right Mike: I think you understand now that the PAR.exe seems to use the
incompatible file or corrupted file error message whenever ANYTHING goes wrong.
Must be DPS version of Terminal Application Error. <G> ( which MS has renamed
GPF by the way.)
>>DPS version of Terminal Application Error. <G>
We are pretty lucky that DPS and the Yost Group are really willing to work with
us to sort these things out. Good Luck.
Michael B.