Playblast Codecs

I've never really been taught anything about codecs to I thought i'd post up the results of a quick test that I did this morning. All test were conducted with the same PC on the same playblast settings, see below for details

MS-CRAM codec

The MS-CRAM only takes a few seconds to playblast, even at HD (1400x788) resolution. As you can see the quality is pretty good and this 3 second clip uses 47.0MB. I would highly recommend using this Codec because of the (relative) high quality, quick render time, and small file size.

IYUV codec

This codec produces similar quality results as the MS-CRAM codec. However the time it takes to render out is a lot longer than MS-CRAM. However, it is worth noting that this is only really noticeable at higher resolutions, when I did a quick test at a lower resolution the time taken by IYUV and MS-CRAM were much the same. The main problem with IYUV is that the file size is a lot lager (127MB), 2.6 times larger than the CRAM file. I would recommend this codec but only for low resolution playblasts.

MS-RLE Codec

This codec has the worst quality of all three that I tested and although it renders quickly, it is no faster than MS-CRAM. The main benefit to MS-RLE is the tiny file size, just 1.28MB, but this does come at a heavy price and the poor quality causes the video to be almost useless as it is difficult to see what is going on in the scene. I would only recommend this Codec if disk space is a serious issue, otherwise it is best left alone.

I did attempt to use the MS-YUV codec and the Toshiba YUV411 codec but both caused the following error message in maya:

"// Error: Unable to create video track. Check format. //"

I hope this has been helpful