Animation files unable to play in Windows 7

[nick_russill]

I am not sure if the issue I am experiencing is specific to Windows 7, however when I render a movie of a pointcloud animation (.mov or .avi), the process completes however I am unable to play the resulting file.

Windows 7 reports "Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file" for avi files, or Quicktime reports error -2048 - can't open because Quicktime does not understand the file.

Occasionally I get errors when creating a .mov file for the second time in a session about the QT buffer.

Are these known issues? I can post my hardware config if needed - I am using a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop.

Regards

Nick

[Dan]

Hi Nick,

Not too sure about Windows 7; it should, in theory, be more friendly than any previous OS.
Try downloading another media player - they usually come with some codecs that WMP doesn't necessarily have. I use Media Player Classic, VLC Player is good too - these are both free.
Check what codec you select in the 'render settings' when making the movie. Alternatively output your animation as individual frames and use a jpeg compiler such as JPGVideo to make the movie.

Hope that helps,

Dan

[nick_russill]

Dan

Thanks for the tip - an excellent one indeed! It is by far preferable to export the individual frames as decent jpegs. This leaves all the control with respect to compression, codecs etc to a follow-up phase depending on the desired deliverable destination.

I take the frames rendered at HD resolution onto my Macbook Pro and use the file sequence import option of Quicktime 7 Pro to create a raw movie that can then be easily exported using H.264.

I'll post a few examples in your gallery once I have some finished articles

Nick

[Dan]

Sounds like a good method, mine is very similar but I use After Effects on PC.

If only I had a MacBook....