Moho Forum

I started a new project where Im combining my drawing rigs with real life videos. The issue Im having is that moho stutters with H264 so it seems. I have no knowledge when it comes to encoding.

These are my tests results.
Both mp4 and quicktime h264 stutter, I dont even know if there is a difference between those formats. However, when I open them with my VLC player everything is perfect. So this concludes its not my pc or gpu?
I converted the same file to AVi/Grass valley/1920x1080 and this was played perfectly in moho. I dont mind working with avi. I just want to know if there are videos codex I should avoid with moho?


Some inside info that might be useful. Before I even tried opening with moho or VLC player, my windows media player said I dont have encoding for HEVC. I paid 1 dollar for some extension HEVC in microsoft store. It worked but in my windows media player the file was stuttering just like moho. First I thought there might be a connection there and that exension from earlier might have skrewed with moho, but after some more tests I have to conclude that moho is worse than windows media player. lol as Windows media player was able to play mp4 without stuttering while moho failed to play both files without stuttering.

What is going on here? Perhaps I'm trolling and moho should be used for drawing purpose only.

It could be that Moho is attempting to play every frame in the footage, but the compressed codec doesn't allow this, so it skips to the designated keyframes (aka I-frames) in the file. This is typical for most animation programs, and .mp4 (h264 or h265) is a horrible format for imported animation reference anyway. It's okay for external reference in a media player (like VLC or MPC-BE) so long as you don't need frame accuracy. (In other words, stepping single-frame forward and backward, which is what you want in an animation program.)

If you're importing a movie file to an animation program, it's better to use an uncompressed format with whole frames like PNG or JPEG, or at least save the compressed movie with every frame a keyframe. Some lossless codecs may work fine too.

When I work with imported footage in any 2D or 3D animation or compositing programs, I prefer to import an image sequence and import the audio as an uncompressed .wav or .aif audio file. This ensures frame accuracy for both imagery and audio. If the footage is meant for final output, then I use either PNG (for Moho) or EXR (for almost everything else.) Both formats use lossless compression. If the footage is just for reference (like an animatic or design), I'll use a compressed JPG sequence because it doesn't need to be high quality, and it will stream well over a network connection. Because it's an image sequence, I still get the frame accuracy I need. (Note: PNG and EXR should be fine over a reasonably fast network; if not, save the files to a local drive.)

Typically, I only use movie files for editing in a video editor, and for final output from a compositing program and the video editor.

BTW, if you need a frame-accurate media player for image sequences, I've been using DJV for many years, and it works great for data-heavy EXR files, PNG (24-48 bit color,) and JPG image sequences! I use it mainly when I need to review footage and render passes and I don't want to bother with launching an animation or compositing program.