Help! Loss of quality when exporting.

[Bandersnatch]

After spending hours upon hours of drawing, compositing and everything else involved in putting my animation together, I get to the export. What happens is that quality drops severely during the export process - at a certain frame, the foreground elements become pixellated and after that the background does the same, returning the foreground to its full quality. This happens no matter what I try - different compression, disabling multi-threaded exporting, everything. Does this happen to anyone else and if so what might be the solution?

Apart from, of course, exporting the movie second by second, an idea I'm hardly enamored with.

[slowtiger]

- Does this always happen at the same frame?
- Does this happen as well when you export as image sequence (PNG)?

[Bandersnatch]

Not the exact same frame - it seems to be around about the same time, when the computer starts sounding like a lawnmower. When I try exporting as PNG sequence there are other problems instead which stop the files from being usable.

[slowtiger]

You mean the fans/discs start up? This is very likely a matter of a not strong enough machine, I'm afraid. In this case you indeed need to render in smaller chunks.

Is your video editor able to import an image sequence and treat it like a video? In that case you're much safer with rendering to PNG images, because damaged frames can be rendered easily again. Which problems do you face with PNG images?

Could you post an example of a bad frame? I'm curious about how the low resolution looks like. (I would guess this happens because the connection between AS and the image file it refers to breaks down during rendering, due to a slow bus in the machine.)

[dueyftw]

It sounds like overload of your memory. Anime Studio loads everything into memory, then renders. One trick is to do a two pass render. Backgrounds first. Like if you have mountains, house and trees that are images. They normally don't move so render them into one image, then try rendering.

Dale