Paumanok West,

I think that our AVI converter/encoding platforms choose best fit based upon the target. We do some pretty big jobs here for our clients and those platforms are ILM/"House of mouse" quality server systems with all of the custom software behind it.

For our web and mobile video market, we just need a simple flash (swf/mp4), ogg and 3gp export environment. We were hoping to not have to create one from scratch, although that is in our range of abilities if necessary. We were hoping for the heavy lifting to come our of iClone5, at least everything but the 3gp part.

The main goal on our end was to offload the small jobs to desktops if possible so we have more capacity in our higher end hardware availability. The Codec issue was just an unexpected wrinkle in our evil master plan. :alien:

Paul

Reality is an Illusion - a Realillusion! Sculpt yours today!

Your existing pipeline is obviously extremely sophisticated: Python image processing on image sequences? :w00t:

I must say, though, that I found a huge abyss between your original post and what you really wanted to do.

Anyway, this note is just to say: why don't you try Lagarith instead of raw. It's lossless but apparently offers some compression.

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

Sweet! So I'm not crazy or stupid. I was beginning to wonder. We normally produce a sequence of stills on our larger projects and run them through python to filter, transform and such and then let it build out the movies.

This doesn't make sense for a 10 minute online video because it takes longer to process this whole thing than to make the movie.

Our other programs typically can produce a basic swf template with an mp4 video along with all of the necessary files (cite Camtasia, Blender and Maya). We've been lucky, our codecs and the programs that use them have been fairly stable up to this point.

For now, we'll just export them uncompress AVI as Wendy and Liquid Clone suggested. Thank you guys for helping me over this bump. The flv export tutorial states that iClone 5 produces swf and flv files, but that isn't what we are getting. I think we have just about every codec out there loaded - we do a lot of video here, and just added iClone to our resources because of its undeniable ability to produce quality 3D animations in minutes. Our web movies need that quality - fast, high quality and universally deployable online. You tube isn't an option because we do lots of commercial message video.

Besides, Internet TV is about to bust out onto the scene (expected to be completely live by 2014 and now is the time to position yourself in that market. The money is good and the projects are still uncensored :)

Thank you all for your contributions on this thread. Have a terrific October.

Paul

Reality is an Illusion - a Realillusion! Sculpt yours today!

Codecs are funny creatures
my Windows Vista craptop plays EVERYTHING thanks to K-lite codec package inc my old mobile phone videos, and they all open render in Windows moviemaker.
Including flv
iClone4 on that computer does wmv as well as avi, mp4 etc
but on my Windows7 64bit desktop
Wmv export will not work in iClone4 or 5
yet it WILL import wmv
does not play ANY imported compressed avi formats at all!
It does render mp4
my other programs such as Daz studio and Carrara ALSO only do uncompressed or a few other flavours of avi, not mpeg (they do on my laptop) infact rendering anything other than uncompressed is asking for trouble, I will get unplayable videos.
Yet strangely, using virtualdub and several other video editors inc Win movie maker, VLC and Wax I can pretty much put it into whatever format I wish
but I HAVE to always render stuff as uncompressed avi or image sequences
what ever the program
just need lots of drive space for the massive files prior to editing!
Bit wary of installing codec packs as I have heard horror stories and have myself experienced unwanted toolbars etc that were a pain to disable.
Prob better always to render uncompressed avi or image sequences
the use a video editor.

I have never exported a "completed" movie from iClone. Everything that I produce is made up of a series of scenes that are put together in a video editing software for the final film.

The best choice for export is, IMHO, Uncompressed AVI. This format can be opened by just about any editing/viewing/conversion software available.

If all that you need to do is convert a clip to another format, using whichever codecs you have on your PC then you could try something like Format Factory (free open source), or any other conversion software available.

Import your AVI file from iClone and convert it not only to another file format, but also resize it if needed. With 1 "master" AVI you can produce files for just about anything.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

hmm, that's interesting. On my export panel, I don't have a "selection of codecs", just a format panel with only a couple of options (only one for mp4) but I have three mp4 codecs on the system, one of them is high end that we use for live video; a size setting for determining the size ... but no "codec list" as such. I don't have a H. xxx codec to select even though I have them in the system or am I missing some secret panel somewhere?

I am new to iClone5 so I do not by any means have a clue about what is happening here.

I do know that we export mp4, swf, mov, wmv, rm, and other formats (hd and such) on a daily basis on this PC. IC5 is the first system that didn't produce immediately upload ready mp4 or swf/FLV videos to date.

We do not have a sound track with this video, but adding one didn't fix anything either.

Once we can produce a working uploaded video with IC, we'll be delighted. I've already lost two days production on this and still don't have an exported working video.

With other animation packages, we choose what codec (normally a list of loaded codecs appears) and away we go. That isn't the case with IC.

I only have: AVI, RM, WMV, MP4 for PC, and FLash Video (FLV). I do not get the html file group if I check it on the advanced tab for flash, just an flv video file that doesn't play.

So, other than being misunderstood, are we using the same export panel?


Reality is an Illusion - a Realillusion! Sculpt yours today!

I'm afraid I don't understand either... When installing iClone 5 (or earlier versions for that matter) nowhere in the installation process do I remember to have selected a particular codec. The codecs you see in iClone are the ones that have been installed at one time or another on your PC. iClone simply uses what's there. One reported exception is anything related to Quicktime.

Except for drafts, I usually export as an image sequence from iClone, so I don't use any codecs for exporting in that case. But there is a whole list I can chose from, including H264, which I had installed at an earlier time.

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I'm sorry, my intent must have not been as clear as it seemed on this side.

The point of this post is:

1. If you're having trouble as a newbie with your iClone5 not producing usable, up loadable or embeddable videos (symptom: no sound-but video or no video-but sound) the problem is probably the CODEC that you chose during the installation process and not an iClone5 fault.

2. Does anyone have a simple way to change that CODEC that was selected during installation so that anyone who did cause themselves this issue can correct it without having to uninstall and reinstall their iClone5 and all of its components.

3. How wide spread is this issue in the body of users of iClone5. It is a problem that appeared a little over a year ago in other video platforms.

It is less about YouTube or Firefox, but is about reliable distribution of our work to the hungry audiences. This issue makes the video fail on YouTube as well. It will upload and convert, but will freeze in the middle of a frame and finish the published timeline as a still image.

4. Maybe opening a dialog on alternative posting/embedding techniques is best left to a more general (non-iClone) forum. You don't know until you test the water ;)

I was hoping that one of our experienced veterans would know how to change codecs without losing hours of productive time since I didn't see an option in the 5 menus, FAQ pages or anywhere on the forums.

Reality is an Illusion - a Realillusion! Sculpt yours today!

I don't mean this to sound as rude as it will probably sound, but is this a solution looking for a problem? I'm a big believer in open-source technologies like HTML 5, too, but iClone users are constantly uploading their work to YouTube and Vimeo without a hitch.

Suppose you do publish your video in a politically-correct open-source format such as Ogg. People still have to find it. If it's not on Youtube, Vimeo, etc., you might as well as have published it on Uranus: it's not going to have any findability.


General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

Ok, this seems to be a problem across the web with lots of video programs out there. The problem as I have been able to discover thus far is that not all mp4 video codecs are created equal.

For instance, Firefox didn't purchase the H. 264 codec, so it uses a different format (ogv - theora) which is a free version, but not completely compatible.

I'm a novice with iClone5 at this point, and it appears that I selected the wrong codec during installation. When I export my videos for the web, they play in a wmv file, or as an mp4 under quicktime but they will not play in HTML5 or in Flash. The FLV file export doesn't play either.

The heart of this problem is the codec that I chose during setup. It's video track profile is unsupported.

The only question that remains is, how do I access that large list of codecs I was presented with during installation so that I can change the base codec? I have tons of codecs on this puter and commonly produce live video and mp4/swf content.

Anyone else having this problem or does any of our seasoned people know how to change the codec without having to uninstall and reinstall everything? HTML5 looks like it will be a huge technology, especially with internet TV coming soon.

I've been working with the videoJS team (an HTML5 viewer group) and they helped identify the basic issue. When we resolve it, iClone users and their HTML 5 video users will be able to publish and resolve our iClone content issues. After all, life is a virtual experience!



Reality is an Illusion - a Realillusion! Sculpt yours today!