Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to incorporate audio with exporting to avi file.

I've created a series of files (*.exr) with Mantra save to disk.

I then loaded those files into MPlay and selected audio track (.wav) and MPlay runs both the animation files and audio files together.

But when I want to export to an *avi file I get the following error message:

I logged a bug on this. The answer I got back is that at the moment there is no support for saving audio with *.avi files.

Only *.mov files is supported.

Unfortunate, since I get better image quality with *.avi than I do with *.mov files ( maxed out quality settings ).

Not an issue either though, since I've played around with a couple Video Editing software programs, it looks like I will be able to enventually get a ‘fit’.

Lightworks seems to be prone to error in having the start of the animation and audio lined up after dragging and dropping the files in their editor timeline; and perhaps due to my inexperience with that software don't know how to ‘line’ up things exactly.

Adobe Premier gives a ‘snap’ to beginning result, so it's easy to line up when all I am doing is synching the beginnings of both houdini animation and the sound file. If I wanted to do more work in Adobe and not all in Houdini I might run into problems though since the ‘timings’ seem to be different.
In the Houdini file it has a total of 540 frames with a setting of 24 fps. Well doing the math that comes to 22.5 seconds. In Premier though it shows the clip as being 21.09 seconds. Odd, but maybe something gets changed into the export to avi and the encoding.

I guess too Houdini was originally and still is emphasized for animation ‘houses’ and most likely because the final input tends to be for film, most house likely have their own workflow that includes some ‘high-end’ Video Editing software in their pipeline that combines audio, specialFX(from Houdini), other animation tracks, film sequences, etc.

But would make a good RFE for small time Houdini users who want to have more variety in exporting formats with audio to post for Internet viewers directly like Vimeo and YouTube.

you're much better off rendering to a high quality image format and then bringing that into an editing program to export a video file - you'll have far more control over the end result - and much more flexibility.

Thanks for your repsonse Michael…

Looking at the docs for the mantra node it states for “Output Picture” parameter the following supported file formates:

.pic, .tif, .sgi, .pic.gz, .rat, .jpg, .cin, .rta, .bmp, .tga, .rad, .exr, and .png.

So I guess some of these would qualify as high quality image formats? So long as the software chosen supports what I would wish to use.

Odd though, even though the docs say these formats, the drop down menu for the output in mantra only gives you 4 choices: 2 MPlay variants, pic, tif and exr. I tried ‘overriding’ the extension with a .sgi just to see and it errors.

I guess what the docs means by supported file formats is not necessarily the mantra node but Houdini in general.
To get those other file formats I might have to use a different renderer other than mantra?

I am wondering though too, anyone know offhand some names of editing software used by animation houses that I might want to check out?

Or am I on track with the same search of “Video Editing” which gives me results like Adobe Premier, etc. ?

are you using the Indie or Apprentice version?
I think these limit output formats…
in that case I'd use pic if you were then going to bring the images back into Houdini for compositing in COPs, or exr if you were compositing/editing in a third party software.

as for an application for editing/exporting to a video format…it depends on your OS…if you're on Win or Mac I'd give Davici Resolve [blackmagicdesign.com] a try - it's a very powerful application used for professional color correction and over the past few versions they have added a huge range of editing tools…and it's FREE.

Thank you very much for this Info Michael.

Yeah, I'm using Indie on Win.

So pic or exr is fine for my purposes, I'm pretty sure I will get the quality I'm aiming for with either one; As using exr with avi exported ( no sound ) as far as image quality with that, was high enough for my purposes.

And Darn, this is embarrassing. I have Davinci sitting on my computer! I knew last winter I was working with some software ( Davinci ) to do something (I forget what) with my exr file sequence. But I forgot the name of the program and couldn't find it on my computer - probably because it's under BlackMagic Design in my programs folder and didn't recognize that name.

Haha, so in depth Houdini is…go down so many rabbit holes and learn stuff…only to forget what you learned down a different ‘hole’ you were working on months ago….

Just did a quick glance on youtube channels for Davinci, looks like lots of tuts there to get up and running with what I want to do.

All set!