Hey guys,

I intended to export a rendered sequence into a quicktime movie, but looking at MPlay->File->Export, the only option I see there is “Movie Export Help”… Is quicktime export broken/deprecated at the moment?


Thanks,
Vlad

OSX 10.7.4
H12.0.658

For OSX, yes.

edward
For OSX, yes.

Is it broken OR deprecated ? i.e. should I look for other solutions or wait for a fix.

Regards

For some reason it has worked for some time.. but when I just tried it yesterday it doesn' t work anymore.. :?

I thought that it was just never implemented? Maybe try installing some old major versions of Houdini?

Yeah, this feature seems to be broken (bug 49892). It's not deprecated, though, afaik.

all the above notwithstanding, its far better to render to an images seq, save that seq, then make an mov (or whatever) in an app designed to do it - there are lots of free ones around

I've had a bug logged about this for a while . I find it essential in my work.

Rob

Same thing. Still…

Use ffmpeg, it can accept an image sequence and output mp4 video

Just now ran into this, any updates on the bug? I used to be able to export as Quicktime through the Image Viewer with no problem, and have been doing that for over a year now. Suddenly, that option is completely gone from the menu. The only thing I can think of is I updated my machine to High Sierra, other than that, nothing else has changed that I'm aware of.

Me too. It's great to be able to drop a quick and dirty self contained movie on your drive for reference. I used it all the time to compare timings on different sim settings where quality isn't an issue. Wrangling hundreds of image files into a sequence every time is a real chore.

Just got news back from Support that the feature is deprecated.

arctor
all the above notwithstanding, its far better to render to an images seq, save that seq, then make an mov (or whatever) in an app designed to do it - there are lots of free ones around

I'd agree if we were talking only about meaningful renders, but for flipbooks and scratch renders (particularly in the fast-moving mo-graphics field) you may generate half a dozen iterations in an hour as you're testing timings (or whatever) and just want to keep a record of them. Lack of a movie export option creates a burdensome amount of extra work, plus a load of extra file wrangling / organisation.

still love Houdini though

Yes, for something quick to post to Slack or email it is much more convenient to have a QT file instead of a sequence that needs to be converted.

Also, let us not assume that everybody knows how to use the tools for the conversions. My animators will give me a stinky stare if I told them to use ffmpeg in a shell.

It used to work in MPlay and it was useful. I'd rather see it fixed than deprecated.

Thank you and have a great sunday.
Andy

I usually just chuck this in a composite ROP post-render cmd, save as default:


assumes your image output field is: $HIP/pic/${OS}/${OS}.$F4.png

Yea this feature seems to pop in and out - I swear I was using it a few weeks ago on Mac and now I can't use it either. I wonder if it has something to do with Quicktime updating in the background.

Totally agree that this feature is a huge time saver for those quick and dirty renders where you need to do a lot of iterations and share them especially when you don't want to have to clean up frames on disk after exporting

I use to export directly into Quicktime to have a look.

But honestly it doesn't take that long to export as an image sequence and import/export from a converter of choice, like ffmpeg mentioned above, or my case I use DaVinci Resolve.( no need to work in ‘shells’ like mentioned above ). Just a few simple clicks and output settings to your desired output format.

I take advantage of being able to use $OS in the file naming of the mantra nodes, and will have several different versions of them(mantra) describing what it is I am testing for, e.g. ‘Quick and Dirty 3x3 640Res’.

Most of the time is spent in the generating of the image sequences, whether you are exporting to disk or generating first in Mplay before trying to convert to Quicktime.

So again - it's not complicated nor does it take much longer.

And by much longer - I mean, the way I mention vs. directly exporting from Mplay, I can do the same with an extra 30 seconds of firing up Resolve, clicking and a couple text boxes like file name - then the conversion is very quick.

The only thing you will have to spend time on is the initial learning how to set your workflow with the desired converter.

Looks like I created a duplicate post here:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/57354/ [www.sidefx.com]

mp4 are super helpful and yes you can export sequences and convert them but it's two tasks instead of one. even is it 30 sec imagine converting 100 flipbooks and you end up like wasting an hour of your life for nothing.

As in Linux if you install ffmpeg it automatically adds that option and its great. That would be really good to have in win/mac environment too.

“..converting 100 flipbooks and you end up like wasting an hour of your life for nothing.”

If your making 100 flipbooks…that's the chunk of time your ‘wasting’…doing conversions doesn't take much longer to add in the process.

And you can use ffmpeg in windows environment too. So lots of options to do batch conversions with ffmpeg.

Hello everyone, I have different builds installed on my OS X - 16.0.705 can export mov, but 16.5.571 can't! Could you guys please fix this issue? I don't remember having this kind of problem in the past… been using houdini since version 14.