Issues with rendering

Rendering Problems

I chose to render five separate files, I did it this way because I could check each part of the animation without having to do a much larger render just to check one problem. Also doing it this way meant I could use one camera at a time and keep each animation separate in-case I needed to change anything.

One major problem I ran into while rendering was controlling the aspect ratio, no matter what resolution I seemed to set the final .avi file would always be 4:3 instead of 16:9, even if the resolution was a widescreen resolution it would then just squash it into a 4:3 format.

The only way I managed to get around this problem was to render it in 1280 x 720 High Definition format and use an uncompressed video codec to export it.

This was a time consuming method of rendering the animations and still left me with problems such as the video files were far too large ( 8 Seconds = 900mb ) this caused problems for my computer as it couldn't keep up with the shire amount of data needing to be processed to play just 8 seconds of footage ( and my computer is Full HD and plays Blu-rays.)

To solve this I had to use a video converter to drop the resolution and change the codec. I used Magic Video Converter to lower it to 720 x 480 using a Divix codec this meant that the 30 second clip had dropped in size to arround 100mb which made it much easier to play as well as the quality being good enough for viewing.

I am unsure if this happened because of something I missed but I spent a long time and many repeated renderings trying to solve the situation and this was the only solution I came up with. In this day a 16:9 picture should be standard as any digital television or monitor will now be in a 16:9 widescreen format.