All,

Okay, I'm starting to get some funky weirdness (yes, that's a technical term!) when I try to export animation. I've uninstalled and re-installed my video driver, but exporting is still funky.

And weirdness.

The stock answer is to uninstall iC4 and re-install, but I'm afraid of losing my carefully constructed house of (custom) cards. How can I go through the un/re install cycle and not losing anything precious -- as Gollum would say.

Thanks in advance,
Queezi

Do you have hardware-forced anti-aliasing applied to iClone?

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| iClone 5 Pro | 3DXchange 4 Pro | popVideo Converter 2 | CrazyTalk 6 Pro | CrazyTalk Animator Pro |

Hi Queezi.

If you decide on the reinstall route just safeguard all your Custom contents by copying and pasting your Custom Folder to your hard drive. My custom stuff is located at: "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Reallusion\Custom\iClone 4 Custom"  I assume yours is same or similar. Personally I would also copy and paste the standard contents too: "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Reallusion\iClone 4 Templates\Template\iClone 4 Template\iClone Template", but thats up to you. Then reinstall iClone and copy and paste the contents of your old folders to the new installed custom and standard folders. I hope this is clear.

I've no idea what the funky weirdness is, but perhaps you need to download the latest video driver rather than reinstalling your existing one or perhaps back up one, depending on your card.

All the best.

:cool: gizmo

PA6,

I'll take a look at that -- if it was something I had to manually set, then the answer is probably "No"...

Thanks for the tip,
Queezi

Gizmo,

The funky weirdness manifests itself when I attempt to export animation. It appears as a black screen followed by a warning message from Vista that: "The device driver shut down but was able to recover." After that, iC4 locks up.

I checked for a newer device driver, but hadn't considered rolling back to a previous version.

Thanks for the back-up advice, it makes me feel better about taking that last step...

Which I'm hoping to avoid,
Queezi

If it's during export it might have to do with the codec you are using. Does this only happen with certain codecs? To exclude any codecs, does it happen when you export uncompressed or as image sequence?

Codecs are worse than video drivers as there are many of them and conflicts are possible. I have read that some video edting programs install codecs of their own that may conflict with what you already have.

So before you install and reinstall iClone I would look into the codecs on your system. There are tools (I don't have their name ready) that can actually discover any conflicts there might be on your system.

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Zuijlen,

I was just about to take the plunge on re-installing, but now you've given me something else to consider! I have, in fact, been playing around with compression after having a near-fatal infarction looking at the file size of uncompressed HD animation...

I'll run another uncompressed test to see if that solves the problem. In the meantime, are some compression applications more stable than others? Is there one you would recommend over another?

Thanks,
Queezi

Okay, ugh. Just ugh...

I ran an uncompressed export and the file was created without incident -- except the video driver bombed AFTER the export was complete!

Crossed fingers, held nose (must have been a pretty sight) and went through the un/re-install boogie. No problems, but on the next test export, the video driver bombed AGAIN, but the export completed successfully...

Dazed, confused and still plagued by funky weirdness,
Queezi

PS -- If it matters, I'm running iC4 on an HP Pavillion 9000 with a Nvidia GeForce 7150M nForce 630M graphics card. The driver version is 179.91.

I noticed that the version of your driver is lower than the current one for desktops but that seems to be the case for this graphics device. I googled a bit and it seems more people have problems, but no clear solution. As for codecs, there is something called the Vista Codec Package, which installs a bunch of them. For iClone I mostly use image sequences but for test I use the DivX codec that comes with the Vista Codec Package.

I'm on a desktop so it's easy to swap out components: I've replaced all kinds of parts of my Pavillion desktop. With a laptop that's not an option. I don't really know what to suggest, but it seems there is something wrong with the graphics driver.

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Z,

I searched the nVidia site at length and could find no more recent notebook version than the one I have -- I even used a couple of third-party utilities that go out and look for new drivers on the web.

In frustration, I uninstalled iC4 Pro from my laptop and installed it on a desktop with 3MB of ram and a robust video card. No problems what so ever!

The poor HP laptop just wasn't up to the task which is a shame, cause in all other respects it's a fine machine. The best scenario would be to create scenes and animation on the laptop and generate the animation on the more powerful desktop, but that creates a whole other can of DRM worms that will have to wait for another rant.

In the meantime, I certainly don't miss funky...

Or weirdness,
Queezi