#LW 4.0k/Flyer Warning!
5 messages in this thread
Lightwave 4.06K appears to be only "slightly aquainted" with the Flyer.
1) Rendering animations as clips creates animations that are VHS quality or
less even before you take it to tape. They are characterized by an overall
fuziness and loss of definition compared to the original images. Chroma crawl
bands get very wide.
2) All animations end up with a few lines at the top of th screen that seem to
come from some other picture/animation. These only show on the clip, not on
original frames of the animation.
3) Either I lost it or imagined it, but it seems to me that in an earlier Flyer
load there was a way to assemble a sequence of framestores into clips. Can't be
done now. Your only choice it so save to IFFs and use the IFF2Clip routine
which appears to only work sometimes and then only from the ARexx bin, and not
TPaint. This is a little bothersome because NT used to war, circa LW 2.0 that
saving as IFFs lost resolution and to keep full resolution of your animation,
they should be rendered as Framestores. The current situation seems to
restrict animations to 3 lossy steps – save to IFF, IFF2Clip, Clip to tape.
The result is unacceptable for professional work – at least from my Flyer.
4) If you do request an animation to save renderings as a sequence of
FrameSotres you MUST NEVER try to render that same sequence to a clip ever
again. (Work around is to rebuild the scene froms scratch). The reason is that
after using the Save Framestore options, the Scene is somehow permanently
corrupted so that attempts to render as a clip causes 8000 0004 crashes that
have the potential to also prevent your machine from cold booting again unless
you shutdown, remove the Flyer, boot the system without it, shutdown, and
re-install the Flyer again.
NOTE: this is not a fluke. I can repeat it at will (in fact, have been so
doing all day). My advice is to forget about using LightWave with the Flyer for
the time being and keep that PAR/Personal Single Frame Controller handy.
wmc – via Autopilot!
Wayne, I'm not sure where the problems you describe are coming from. I have
been using a Flyer for anim work for about 3 months and have noticed little
degradation exept on fine gradients, where some banding can result. Over all
we are fairly happy with the results we are getting. We work with MII and
could render direct to tape if we want but find that the Flyer is adequate for
everything but the most difficult anims, of which HQ5 should fix. Just
recently installed 4.06 and have rendered four anims over the last few days and
have not noticed any quality loss over previous revisions, although there seems
to be some bugginess in the plug-in. I encountered a few crashes when
initiating the rendering. I am not familiar with the FS. bug, sounds really
strange that it corrupts the scene file. Hope you some luck, it sounds like
you could use some.
Jason Shald
Production Engineer
Northwall Video Productions
I sent Chuck two version of a simple scene. One crashes on attempts to render
to FLyer clip, the other does not. The only difference is that one has the
save anim infor stored in the file, the other does not.
Re: the degradation, try just rendering a scene with the default gradient
squeeze. On my machine and someone elses (who caused me to check – I normally
save frames to disk then single frame to tape) the background looks like a 16
color dither from a Dpaint full screen gradient fill. The other degradations
were so bad just on the Flyer clip playback I didn't even bother to tape them
(was afraid they would REALLY depress me if I saw another level of degradation
as they went to tape).
wmc – via Autopilot!
Wayne,
If you noticed another message I posted to Chuck, the LW 4.0 beta version seems
to have massive problems in saving scene information (my problems were with
regard to image informaiton, in particular remembering image info and flyer
clips mapped to objects, and forgetting other image info that I deleted. LW 4.0
is very buggy. I thought I saw a message saying that we would have a choice in
the 4.06 release of 3.5 kludged into flyer, or the beta 4.0. I will probably
have to downgrade to 4.03 just to get my LW work done! Anyone else remember
this?
Brian
Well, I was able to construct two versions of the same scene that cause the
render-to-clip crash and sent that off to NT. It also displays the missing top
scan line problem. I'm also re-rendering a scene to a clip that is the same as
one I rendered in 3.5 to a clip. Gonna play them back-2-back to see the diff.
wmc – via Autopilot!