How do you deal with long video output?

I’m working on an animation for a puppet show that’s about 30 minutes long. I split the various animation scenes up into manageable chunks and am using the video sequence editor to put it all together. When I render it all out it ends up being 54,000 frames (30 fps) and my computer apparently can’t handle 54,000 PNGs in one folder (though I have 16GBs of RAM) so I’ve had to render it out as a movie. The problem is that I continue to need to make small changes to the various scenes, but since I’m rendering to MP4 instead of an image sequence, I have to re-render the entire 30 minutes.

How do you guys deal with longer animations like this? Is there a way around this? Am I missing something?

Break the video up in to bite size sections and render each section to png and put it in it’s own folder. Now no single folder contains 54k pngs, yet you maintain the ability to easily edit.

Thank you for your reply. I’m guessing you would then render to a video file from that step? I guess that would work. It’d add yet one more step to my rendering process, but would allow me to render just the specific portion that I need before rendering everything to video.

A 30 minute video done by a individual. Damn I’ve never broken two minutes including credits. Sorry but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around a 30 minute clip. Please post when done if you would.

All the master media could be png while the compilation of all shots the VSE could be proxies of your strips. The proxy media can be highly compressed movies media. This isn’t used in final render but eases memory usage. Then rerendered frames can just be dropped in at their correct place in the master.

So you don’t have to render one whole pass just individual shots or even scenes.

use ffmpeg, it is available for linux, OS and windows, and it is very powerful,
if you have some time and knowledge, the best is to write a batch or shell-script

i would propose to make a lot of smaller sequences out of the images, and join these sequences in a second step.

@theoldghost: Thanks, but it’s really not as impressive as it sounds. The animations only occur sporadically throughout the 30 minutes and the animations are 2D and very simplistic—the show’s about shapes and colors for five year olds. All told, the animation is probably only about 12 - 15 mins or the total 30.

Thanks for the help. I think the easiest thing for me to do is to split the main sequence into several smaller chunks that render to PNG, then add a second step that sequences that and renders it out to video. That way I can re-render only those portions that need it.

It is strange that your pc can’t handel that many files in one directory, fat32 partitons can handle 65,534 files per directory and total of 268,435,437 files. NTFS even moar: http://superuser.com/questions/446282/max-files-per-directory-on-ntfs-vol-vs-fat32

Maybe it is the image preview generation that makes problems so you might want to deactivate it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-thumbnail-previews-in-windows-vista-explorer/

I don’t quite understand at which stage the 54000 images in the same folder become necessary. If the animation is already split into scenes, wouldn’t various separately numbered sequences already be the default output?
Or are you using the VSE to render your edit straight from Scene strips?

I’m using the VSE to render my edit straight from scene strips (if I’m understanding correctly).
I have 24 individual scenes. I take those and sequence/composite them in the VSE. From the VSE I was planning to render to PNG, but my computer couldn’t handle the 54k PNGs in one folder so instead I render to video.

I think in the future I’ll split the sequence/compositing file into several manageable chunks so I can re-render specific portions to PNG as needed. Then sequence those in another file and render to video. I need to take a look at the various Blender open-movies to see how they manage their files.

Hmmm… I thought the open movie project files were available for free download, but I’m only finding them on the Blender store. I guess I’ll have to wait for more funds.

The open movies and the Tube project discovered that you cannot expect to render the whole project via scene output through the VSE. They all use image sequence renders, compiled in the VSE.