Fcheck Dont Open Some Animation Sequences

[dickagm]

Hi all, I have rendered 8bit TGA format sequence with mental ray and additional IFF sequence for depth. I can open every individual image with Fcheck but when I open animation sequence of those images from File>Open Animation, Fcheck disappears ! That was happening sometimes before with some other sequences and I didn't figured out why. Now its critical for me to understand why.
One of my sequences is only the z depth channel stored in Z channel of an IFF file (that iff does not have RGB or A channels, it only contains Z channel) and thats why it can be opened only in Fcheck (even Maya cant open it) and then I'm saveing it as TGA converting z channel to Black and White luminance. (Fcheck does that automaticly)

My problem is that I cant open the whole sequence at once and save it at once as different format, currently I can convert frame by frame but I have more than 1000 frames and thats why it is not acceptible to do it by hand.
So How Can I Open That Sequence In Fcheck, or some method for asembling both TGA(rgb a) and IFF (z) to an IFF(rgb a z)

10x in advance

[joojaa]

QUOTE(dickagm @ 06/11/07, 04:20 PM) [snapback]267911[/snapback]
and then I'm saveing it as TGA converting z channel to Black and White luminance.

Argh! Fchek is made for viewing the data. However the data is not back and white! Its a floating point value of -1/dsitance, because you need to see it somehow its been linearized to 8 bit texture space. However if you go ahead and use thet in a comp application your going to be shooting yourself in the leg.

See fchhek does something called normalization, so the furtest frame in the image gets darkest value and the closest white. However for a post effect you dont want that, you want the data intact (unfortunately after effects for example cant read in the z depth data its just totaly blind to floating data like this, in fact AE is blind to raw data period. So i suggest for your peace of mind to either use digital fusion or shake because they have access to the raw data).*

Why? Well the max min range varies form frame to frame, and so will your black and white imagery. This has led to the very common misconception that the depth is variant it isnt just normalized depth is variant. So you will end p having a mess of it all when you comp. Offcourse you may luck out in having stable range. but don't count on it.

So either pull out the data at some custom range, or use the real data in comp.

Ps maya can open it, but only for certain operations ist still no use as textre but is of use for image planes and rendering.

*to Aron Ross this is the kind of stuff you get when you do purely artist friendly, sometimes the raw is the way to go and not enabling can be more of a hinder than anything else. Which brings in a valid point i heard today. Ease of use is in contradiction t effect of use. So when you optimize ease of use you alienate the hardcore users so in way you'd need to have 2 guis one easy to learn and one hard. Off course can you imagine the pain switching over.

[dryo]

Cool beans, thanks for illuminating all that. I didn't realize a Z-buffer was floating point data rather than grayscale. But that makes perfect sense, because 256 levels of gray is obviously not enough to get any semblance of precision.

It's too bad that After Effects doesn't support the raw Z data, but that's really not relevant to the discussion of an intuitive interface. Adobe could add support for proper Z buffering and still have the exact same GUI. As for Shake, I don't have a clue, nor do I have a Mac, but I may end up learning Combustion since it came free with my copy of Maya...

[joojaa]

Well yes but its one of the symptoms since you carter the beginners no idea in putting effort in hard stuff because they cant manage it. But my friend pointed out a nice issue with better guis to learn.

Intuitive is not equal to effective, for example the software used mostly are intuitive, however there limits to intuititive. Most prominent example of this is the windows start menu, which is fine if you have 10 program groups. I would end up having 68 if i handn't resorted to total redesign and stop using it completely (which also means most users cant use my windws). Now then can you take some middle line well sure vista does this t adds the search. But problem is that then you'd need to know what you have in order to use that. And still for effect you'd use keyboard shortcuts or other means.

NOW here comes the catch which plagues a lot of tools. In order to be effective youd need to ditch the intuitive gui, in favor of something totally else. So in essence once you've learned the intuitive tools you now need to re learn everything for effect. Now mayas designed to sidestep this issue completely the gui is totally scripted. SO if theres something you don't like in it and need to change for YOUR work flow you will. Off course maya only has this pro interface even more pro interface, and insanely pro interface.

BUt 3d is also about effect and speed. For example i NEVER use the toolbox, i don't need it i have keyboard shortcuts (default ones), that work faster and better. I also never show the main menus, waste of space (i do however use panel menus). i rarely use attribute editor for anything except when i teach or learn new nodes, or make shader. networks. I dont really need the status line for anything but because i have so much horizontal space i have more buttons on it.

So on the long run it does not matter what the first impression is as long as it works when you do it day in and out.

And offcourse your free to redesign mayas gui or atleast 87% of it if you wish.

[dickagm]

3 not effective answers..

[joojaa]

Well the answer is NO, if your doing this then theres something WRONG with your pipeline. Because the zdepthn gained in this way is tainted for good. the aswer wont change how much you want it to, and im sorry its not the aswer for your question or a solution but its the bottom line.

Anyway open it in chunks. it will work. i didnt say that tough, use

http://www.stdout.org/~luke/iff2tga/iff2tiff.php

instead, but again if your comp does not support floating point images then your screwed. this leaves many AE users in bind and theres nothing you can do about it, sort of rewriting the code above to output 8 bit images with user settable ranges. Ita actualy AE's 4rd biggest flaw, and leaves 1/4 of all comp solutions out of reach for AE.

now the person who wrote the utility was under the impression all comp apps have same flaw as AE but hes wrong this has been integral comp splution way back in 98. But no, the use of fchek persists.

Read the first post it answers all your questions. if you do this and use it for atmospheric haze or z comp you get flawed results you can only use in circumstances that i bet are not present. the data is useless if its normalized. because then you end up keying the fix. theres nothing you can do about this in fcheck so don't even try.

But lets it it the other way what do you want to do with the data? And what app do you use.

PS. don't also convert images in fchek what it does is it saves them as screengrabs ffrom its view. Wich is fine if you can fit the image. But maya comes with 2 separate toold for this imcvt and imconvert

[dickagm]

What I'm asking is why Fcheck isn't working?
I can't open animation sequence in fcheck!
Maybe some peoples have noticed that fcheck doesn't open some sequences as animation, it closes automaticly when I do "Open Animation" and point the first file of my sequence. When I do "Open Image" and point the same file it is opened normally in Fcheck also every other file from that sequence is opening normally as a single frame. That is the situation.
Anyway thank you for the theories about pipelines or what is Z depth range, normalizing or that AE doesn't work with some Z depth formats.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(dickagm @ 06/12/07, 07:28 PM) [snapback]267969[/snapback]
What I'm asking is why Fcheck isn't working?

bcause its a sequence of zdepths the normalization takes a wee bit of time and effect. Secondly you can run out fo memory for big images. But it all is no problem since you dont need it anyway.

[joojaa]

reading fchek manual says you have to use the -Z switch to force it to read floating point data in animation mode (note the zdepth uses as muh memory as the R G B A combined)

[dickagm]

Thank you Joojaa, I've tried all kind of options but without result. Finally renaming of sequence padding from 3 to 4 digits solved the problem. (from depth.001.iff > depth.0001.iff)

here is what happens with 3 digits padding:

\render2-069\bats\depth>fcheck -n 100 120 1 -z -v depth.@@@.iff
File : depth.@@@.iff
FOR4 736400 CIMG
.TBHD 32 960x540 B&W RLE, 16 bits without Mask, ZBuf, 135 tiles
.AUTH 10 mental ray
.DATE 25 Mon Jun 11 05:08:53 2007

.FOR4 736292 TBMP

1 file(s) checked, 0 error(s)