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3DS Max Rendering question


bwilson
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I am looking to fake animorphic widescreen in an animation that I am doing that is actually being targeted for display on a traditional 4:3 screen. Normally I render the scene 720x480 DV in max, and then apply the masking black bars in Premiere before rendering the M2V video.

 

I am looking for a solution to not have to render the entire area of the frame (720x480 @ .9 aspect ratio)that I would be blacking out anyway to reduce some of the render time in Max.

 

Any suggestions from someone with experience in this matter would be great. Thanks in advance.

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what i tried was to render the video at 720x288 at .9 pixel ratio, and import in Premiere and select "maintain aspect ratio" but I am just concerned with quality loss. I don;t have much time to experiment at this point, so I wanted to reach out to see if anyone has had any success in this matter.

 

Any additional thoughts would be great

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Originally posted by bwilson:

what i tried was to render the video at 720x288 at .9 pixel ratio, and import in Premiere and select "maintain aspect ratio" but I am just concerned with quality loss. I don;t have much time to experiment at this point, so I wanted to reach out to see if anyone has had any success in this matter.

 

Any additional thoughts would be great

maybe someone will reply that had more experience with this, but i don't think you would lose quality by doing this, although i have always rendered at 720x540 using a 1 pixel ratio.

 

maybe you could set up 30 or so frames to render and give it a try.

 

if you have premier set up at 720x480, and a .9 ratio, and you import a 720x288 with a .9 ratio, when you dropped the fottage on the stage it should center, leaving with 96 pixels of black above, and 105 pixels of black below.

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As long as you aren't trying to resize the frames you render, then you won't lose any quality. So maintain aspect ratio on the 720x288x.9 in a 720x480x.9 project should work fine. One thing to bear in mind though, is that prior to version 6.5, premiere had a bug with the maintain aspect ratio. I can't remember what it was exactly, I just know there was something wrong with it.

 

-Chad

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thanks chad,

 

i think you hit on the problem I am experiencing. I am using premiere 6.5 and when i realtime preview the clip on the timeline after selecing "maintain aspect ratio" it shows up fine, but when I export the clip, it becomes vertically distorted. Perhaps the problem is premiere related and not an improper Max aspect ratio setting.

 

Thanks for the input Chad.

 

Any other thoughts out there, please chime in.

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I export the clip from Premiere as .m2v using default NTSC video settings. And then view in WMP and Encore, which compensate for the aspect ratio.

 

I'm going to give it another try tomorrow and see what happens. I going to be rendering out a scene of about 12 shots at 250-300 frames per shot at about 7-12 minutes per frame. So any render time I can save this week would speed things up for me a bit.

 

I only have access to two additional computers this week, and four over next weekend, that I can dedicate to rendering 24/7. Just trying to squeeze everything I can out of the two CPU's by cutting the vertical height of the render, since I am going to be cropping it anyway. If it works and I can do it without sacrificing quality, I can probably cut about 25% off my render time.

 

Thanks for all the help everyone. I'll post the video when it's finished.

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