Render to MP4 is very blurry?

[neurologix]

Hi, I just bought SLATE and started reading through the documentation. The main goal of my use is to render a camera shot from the editor to mp4 files. When I try to do so, it comes out *very* blurry with a lot of variability between frames. How can I fix this?

[Gavalakis]

Hello,

Thank you for purchasing Slate.
The MP4 video format is really mostly there for previewing reasons.
For production, I would highly suggest that you please use either of the Image Sequence formats like PNG.
Then within prety much any decent video editing software, you will be able to import that image sequence without a hassle and encode it to a high quality MP4 video.

Here is also a nice little tool that can do just that for your convenience:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeavi/

Please let me know if that is an option that works for you.
Thank you!

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

[noodlespice]

Yes I just purchased SLATE hoping to make MP4 movies and have found the output to be a bit buggy, even with Audio disabled and a small screen size.

I was hoping to avoid the offline rendering/composition workflow.

How do we “fix” this Gavalakis? Are you able to outline what the bottleneck is? It plays well and smoothly in the Unity Editor and I was hoping we could simply capture that output.

I’ll see if Keijiro’s renderer works. I have had success with that in the past but I’m not sure if it can capture audio.

Will report back 🙂

Cheers

<edit>

I’ve spent a couple of hours looking at various solutions:
Keijiro’s script does not compile
Unity’s video recorder is all kinds of a mess. It requires UJT Framerecorder and then claims there are 2 dll’s called core
UJT FrameRecorder has it’s own Play button which does not trigger SLATE’s editor Play button.
I tried to hack into the code for a free demo from the Asset store so it would be triggered by the SLATE play button – that kind of worked but then lost contact with the Render Camera
A similar problem with another free trial from the Asset store – lost contact with Render Camera.

So while their appear to be many (varied) MP4 recording solutions the issues I found were:
triggering from SLATE play function in ClipEditor script (not a big issue with some work I think)
the recorder not seeing SLATE’s Render Camera
other stuff I don’t know about yet (such as the load on the CPU/GPU outputting frames while switching and layering in SLATE which might derail any attempt at real time rendering)

I’d be happy with a semi-offline solution that included audio. As it stands I’d have to render PNGs and then get my timed audio mixed somehow and then composite the 2. Unless I’m missing something important. One of SLATE’s benefits is the ability to tweak animation and audio tracks in the Editor like Premiere or Final Cut.

As I said I was hoping that SLATE provided a “realtime” rendering solution. This does not take away from the fact that SLATE is an enormous gain for people wanting to make cutscenes and realtime movies (like me).

Gavalakis would you mind taking a moment to describe the technical impediments to attaching a MP4 renderer to SLATE’s Render Camera? Thanks

Cheers!

[Gavalakis]

Hello there,

For your information, I did not write the rendering library myself and Slate IS using that same UTJ FrameRecorder which is freely distributed on github. It is just slightly altered and to nicely integrate with Slate. Thus the ability of the rendering is more or less limited by the UTJ FrameRecorder library capabilities. The library has been through several updates/improvement, but as long as I remember it always had some issues with MP4 video recording.

This is why I always suggest that people use the PNG/EXR Image Sequence format for rendering. If you also want to export the audio, then you could use the MP4 format only for the audio and composite the Image Sequencer with the exported audio from the MP4 in a video sequencer. While I understand it would certainly be more convenient to have it all in one go, this is literaly a 5 minutes job to do in any descent video editor 🙂

With that said, I will take a nother look at the UTJ library ( and the integration) to see if something can be improved from my end.

Thank you.

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

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