Movies with point clouds can suffer from a fair bit of flicker which is not so nice. Luckily this is not too difficult to solve.
If you take a look at the Demo Movie in the gallery you'll see that its almost completely flicker free, its also very nice and sharp. This was achieved using the steps outlined below, so read on!
If you render in final mode the quality is higher and includes anti-aliasing. However it does tend to take its time and the draft renderer is much faster. The draft renderer does not include anti-aliasing so the trick is to render out at a higher resolution and then down sample. So for high quality rendering try:
- 1. Increasing the point size to 2 or more.
- 2. Rendering out twice the resolution you need. So render 1280 x 1024 for a 640 x 480 movie. In draft movie you will be limited to the size of the viewport. You can collapse the side bar down and all the toolbars too to increase the viewport size. You'll be able to render full screen in the next release by using a shortcut when in fullscreen mode.
- 3. Use Motion Blur! It makes a huge difference. The higher you can set it the better - this will depend on the time you have available for rendering.
- 4. Always render to a stills sequence using a non-lossy format such as tga (never jpg!). You can render to a movie file at the same time, but use this as a preview only.
- 5. Import the stills sequence into Adobe After Effect, Autodesk Combustion or whatever editing / compositing package you use. If you're not using a compositing package and don't want to spend alot, there are a few cheap options available. Just Google around for 'compositing software' and see what you can find. If you'd like some feedback on a package post your link / question here and I'll try to help out.
- 6. Resize the movie to half the rendered size and render out your compressed version. I find the XviD compressor gives the best results vs. size.
