Hello!

I have recently made an animation which compromises of 120 frames. It has multiple geometries moving at different speeds. However, when I render and export it as an animation (avi. windows format), it looks completely different as to when I export it as a frame (by using the save frame as.. > png or jpeg). The video format tends too be more vivid, has better contrast of colours, sharper, and the quality seems to be overall much better compared to when I export it as a picture. Why is that the case? Shouldn't it be the same really? Since it is the same sequence of frames bundles together to form a video? This can be clearly seen in the attached files (whereas, the animation is included as a dropbox link due to size).

It also seems that the lights within the scene tend to contribute more in the animation than in a single frame export. I would like replicate the quality, colours, and sharpness of the frames contained in the video in a single image. How can I do that? Generally, what is the best means to export a frame in terms of colour vividness, resolution, and sharpness? Does it have anything to do with image output settings?

As for my mantra settings:

Pixel Samples = 7 x 7
Min / Max Ray Samples = 2 / 9
Reflect Limit = 2
Refract Limit = 10
Diffuse Limit = 2
Color Limit = 4

Everything else is similar to default mantra settings.



video animation: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6swl6a11isnlt9u/plexus_test3.avi?dl=0 [www.dropbox.com]
(note: quality and resoltuion will/might appear low due to dropbox preview mode)

The joys of different image/video formats using different colour spaces. There may be a gamma issue too in this case, since it's a pretty big difference, so you might have to override the gamma in the export options for one or more of them. Which one looks closest to how it looks in Render View?

ndickson
The joys of different image/video formats using different colour spaces. There may be a gamma issue too in this case, since it's a pretty big difference, so you might have to override the gamma in the export options for one or more of them. Which one looks closest to how it looks in Render View?

In the render view, it looks exactly like the single frame export (the image attached to this post). So it was a surprise to find the video output to be more visually appealing- thus kept it as it is. I think you are right. I did play with the gamma, brightness, contrast, and color IO settings (found in the Mplay render view) and did get a result which was somewhat closer to the one in the animation. However, when I tried to export it with the new settings (save frame as.. > png), the changes made in the MPlay settings were not taken into account. I simply got the same results as the image attached to this post.

If you want to change the gamma for saving images, in the Save As dialog for single frames, there's a “Convert to Image Format's Colorspace” toggle that you can turn off. My guess is that the video exporter must not be applying gamma or something like that, so the equivalent is to set the “Output Gamma” option to 1, (the default is 2.2).