#PAR field problem
11 messages in this thread
I just experienced a nasty little problem with the PAR and want to know if
anyone else has seen this. I've been rendering my room animation to the PAR for
the last couple days. I've been interrupting it when I get home from work to
get on here etc. (Can't wait for NT) Anyway, the frames from last night and
todays render have their fields reversed from all of my previous stuff. I've
been joining them with the PAR software when I get home. Five minutes ago.
Right where I joined, the fields change and the whole animation shifts down and
strobes somewhat from that point forward. Absolutely nothing has changed on my
system since the previous renders. I'm using the 1.5 version the PAR software.
Is there a way to reverse the fields on a range of frames? Does this mean that
17 hours of rendering time is wasted? I've been rendering stuff to the PAR for
about one month and this is the first problem I've had with it. Does anyone
have any ideas?
DM
David,
there's a field order switch in the preferences (or used to be in 1.34b etc).
That may help. But if you imported your files the with the switch the wrong
way, I hope you hung on to the .tga files so you could copy them back again
with the field order in the right direction.
David,
>> Right where I joined, the fields change and the whole animation shifts down
and strobes somewhat from that point forward. <<
I haven't experienced this, but there are a couple of possible solutions.
One is to split the animation where it shifts to a reverse order fields and
change the field order on the PAR and rejoin the two. This is the easiest if it
works.
The second option is to dump all the frames back on to the hard drive that have
their field order reversed and import them again by switching the field order
switch from what it was. This should work, unless the field order got switched
in 3DS, in which case you may have a real problem. What you could then do, is
output them as fields and bring them back in as fields.
You'd have to test to get the first frame right which might mean rendering a
frame to fields importing it, so that you have the correct first field, then
they should match up in pairs. You shouldn't have to re-render unless for some
reason some of the frames get corrupted in the process.
Best of luck,
John
this might be a dumb question but does it not degrade the quality of the tga;s
every time you copy back to the harddisk and then reload the targas again on
the par?
David,
>>but does it not degrade the quality of the tga's every time you copy back to
the harddisk and then reload the Targa's <<
The loss isn't real perceptible the first time around and in a pinch like in
DM's case, it'll work. Better to keep it in straight ANI format though like
Razor Pro does. But no I wouldn't want to make a practice of it. You know me,
I'm not totally enamored by its output as "broadcast quality" as it is. You
might be interested to know that the D/Vision NLE editor uses the same kind of
HD's but are SCSI.
John
What previous version of the PAR software were you using prior to 1.5? I found
that on going from 1.09 to the 1.3x betas that I had to set the PAR software to
the opposite of what the DOC's said (ie 3DS field-order=1 and PAR
field-order=2). I've found that this holds for 1.5, also.
Dave
David,
This is concerning your PAR field order problem you reported on 2/21. I
realize this is late and you probably have everything taken care of by now, but
I ran into something similar a couple of days ago. I had loaded the new
PAR.EXE 1.5 half-way thru a project and didn't notice it changed the field
order for me, so I rendered some segments to the PAR in the wrong order. With
a little expermentation, I found I could correct the field order for frames
already on the PAR by
– Changing the field order from 2 to 1 in the PAR Prefs dialog.
– Exporting the ANI as TGAs to the HD
– Changing the field order back to 2 in the PAR Prefs dialog.
– Importing the TGAs as a new ANI
This corrected the field order at the expense of some small loss of quality due
to the second JPEG compression. For my case, the loss of quality was more
desirable than re-rendering all the frames.
Sorry to bother you if you already knew this. If you didn't, sorry I didn't
find it sooner. Happy rendering!
JKJ
>>PAR field order problem
Could you repost the described problem w/a fix, John; just installed 1.5 on my
system and can't get fields to work no matter what I've tried. TIA…
John Stetzer
JWS
>>can't get fields to work…
Hi JWS,
This problem was a bunch of frames rendered with fields and sent to the PAR
with the wrong field order. With the field order in 3DS.SET set to 1, the
field order should be set to 1 with PARDRV or to 2 with PAR.EXE/PAR.INI. In my
case, I rendered to the PAR with field order=1 instead of 2. To fix it, I
exported the frames to TGAs with fieldorder=1, then imported them with
fieldorder=2.
This, however, probably doesn't apply to you if fields don't work at all. To
get fields to work with the PAR should be fairly straight forward:
– set FIELD-ORDER=1 in 3DS.SET
– set the field order to 2 in the PAR.EXE Prefs dialog
– turn fields ON in the render dialog
Assuming you've done this, I don't know what could keep it from working, unless
it is a hardware problem. You said you just installed v1.5 – does that mean
that fields worked with an earlier version but don't work now or is this the
first time you tried to use fields? If you render a single frame of a simple
fast-moving object in the KF with fields on, can you see both interlaced fields
on the PAR display?
JKJ
>>is this the first time
Nope: I'm a field-o-holic for at least a year now :^). Settings are as you
gave, but a sequence that imported from tgas on a seperate HD correctly under
1.30b imported w/field reversed when used as a background ifl. I just tried
bringing them straight in through the PAR.EXE, w/the same result. The original
plays fine; this one has me puzzled. Was hoping for some easy settings change;
it must be something simple I missed somewhere. Major sigh; oh well, there's
always tommorrow. Thanks for the info.
…later
Well, found out what it was, John. I did have fields set to 2 on the main
screen; because I saw this I didn't corollate the 2 in your post w/the prefs
subscreen. Man, there must be a sizable dent in my forehead from all the times
the heel of my hand has come in contact w/it lately (rueful :^). Again, thanks
for the info; now all I need to do is work on the (mental) processor on this
end ;^).
John Stetzer
JWS <looks nothing like a J*J ;^)>
>> I had loaded the new PAR.EXE 1.5 half-way thru a project and didn't
>> notice it changed the field order for me
<BG> You make it sound like a feature!
I actually just re-rendered, but thanks for the great tip on changing the field
order.
DM