[Bf-committers] Confusing Render, File Format and Encoding presets

Reuben Martin reuben.m at gmail.com
Mon Jan 24 01:58:58 CET 2011


On Friday, January 14, 2011, Damir Prebeg wrote:
> I find organization and interaction of render, file format and
> encoding presets under render options quite inconsistent and
> illogical. So here are my proposals:
> 
> A) First smaller annoyances:
> Default render preset that we get when Blender is first started is not
> even listed under Render presets dropdown. Also, there's no option for
> aspect ratio locking while changing image dimensions.
> Is there any special reason why actual frame rate is calculated from
> framerate and framerate base and not simply one float value for
> framerate (eg. FPS: 23.976 instead of FPS:24 and Base:1.001)?

Living in the US I can not stress how much of a PITA it is when dealing with video set as a decimal rather than a frame-rate / frame-base ratio. Causes all sorts of annoying little sync problems. Being able to specify both is invaluable.

> And there's a bug: Select any Render preset, and then reload startup
> file (Ctrl+N). All values except selected Render preset name in that
> dropdown box will be reloaded.

What's actually needed is a means to store your own custom presets. (i.e. the settings are not stored in the file, which preset was selected is what is stored)

> 
> I propose that there should be "Default" entry by default,
> implementation of aspect ratio lock and one simple floating point
> framerate.
> 


layout needs to be something logical. Right now different parameters are scattered all over the place and it is a mess. I would propose a render panels to be stacked somthing like this:

==== Render Action Pannel ====

- Select from user-created presets
- Render Type (Render Animation, Preview Render, Bake
- Enable / Disable Compositor & Sequencer

==== Render Settings specific to rendering engine ====

- Aliasing
- Sample filter
- Dithering
- Render Layers
- Render feature enable / disable

==== Non-Format or Render Engine Specific Options ====

- Frame Rate, Frame Base
- Resolution
- Display Aspect Ratio  -or-  Sample Aspect Ratio  (Being able to switch between the two as an option would be super nice)
- Field / Frame
- Color Range (having the option to clamp YCbCr values to match 601 or 709 spec would be nice)
- Stamp

==== Format Type ===

- Video Format  -or-  Image Format   -or-  Frame Server
- Format specific options
- Codec(s) used (from what is availble for selected format)

==== Codec Options -or- Image Type Options ====

- Codec or Image format specific options

==========


Beyond that I would even recommend dropping support for many of the formats and codecs. Anything with P and B frames in an AVI file is a mess. For that matter I don't understand why blender supports non-intraframe codecs anyway.  There are plenty of tools outside of blender to deal with transcoding into distribution formats. Limiting supported video formats (likewise with audio formats) to things like MJPEG, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, FFV1, and other similar intra-frame or lossless codecs would make for a lot less headaches in the sequencer.  To be honest I think it's kinda pointless to try to support things like x264 where the amount of options availble (if all exposed) would take up quite a bit of space. But they again, the one option you don't make availale to reduce size is of course the one option I want to get access to. This is why even now, I do all my encoding outside of blender.

-Reuben


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