pixels : PIU : Tutorial Title

Introduction

If people say a picture is worth a thousand words, then what about an animation? Studio 3.7 now includes built in support for QuickTime™. Users can now use QuickTime™ movies as shaders and users have the ability to render directly to a movie file. This tutorial will show the user how to render out the a movie file. The tutorial will also give a brief explanation of the codecs (Compression / Decompression) used in QuickTime™.

This tutorial requires:

Pixels3D | studio | v3.7

QuickTime 4.1 or higher

Downloads

QTTutorial.sit

Create an Animation

For this tutorial we will create a simple "spinning cube". For fun, lets apply a different color to each face of the cube. This can be done by using ShaderMaker's cuber node. Look at the included scene file for details.

Specify the Settings

Now it is time to specify the settings for your movie. When you click on the "Settings…" button you will see the dialog to the the left. This lets you choose the FPS (Frames per Second) and Codec (Compression Decompression). You also have control over the quality. The higher the quality the bigger the file format. After you are finished editing the settings you simply render the scene out as you would do any other scene. Your you will be prompted to save your file at the beginning of the render process. Be sure to have "Export to QuickTime" checked.

Finished Product

To the left is the finished movie. You can play this movie as you would any other movie.

A Little about the Codecs

As stated above, Codec means Compression/Decompression and there are a plethora of Codecs included with QuickTime™. Some examples of codecs are Cinepak™ and Sorenson. To the left are two rendered cubes, but one with Sorenson high quality encoding (left), and the other with Cinepak low quality encoding (right). There is a considerable difference in file sizes and appearances. As you lower the quality the image, the appearance suffers. Play around with the different codecs and choose one that is right for you.

Sorenson is one of the most popular codecs around. The quality is great and the file size is small. The sample movie in this tutorial was encoded using Sorenson.