Animation codec error in IRender NXT KA28nxtc

A colleague of mine who has been using IRender for images for a while needs to produce an animation but neither him nor I could get it to work today.

He is running Windows-7 64-bit

Sketchup version 8.

IRender version KA28nxtc

He keeps getting a codec error on his machine:

"Cannot save animation frame: Unable to Create Compressed Stream: Check your CODEC options."

How do I check codec options? I noticed there is no way in the dialogs to select a codec and I am sure that in the past there was.

I checked the installed codecs using Windows media Player Help. It appears both Cinepak Radius and MSVC are installed.

Do you have any thoughts on this? He does have Windows-7 32-bit on another partition on his machine. Should we install on that and try it? Hopefully his license will work for that.

Thanks

Derek Jenkins

derekmjenkins@gmail.com

Attachments:

irendernxt codec error.PNG, 20 KB
video codecs.PNG, 33 KB

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on November 26, 2013 at 3:48pm

In the latest version, there is a button to select the codec to use on the Animation dialog.

if you can run the new version, please have him try a couple of different codecs listed there and see if he has any luck. You could try installing the new version on that other machine and see if it works for you.

Otherwise, I would set the output of the animation to be .png files, instead of an avi file. Then you can take the folder of images that it produces to a program that assembles the animation from a series of image files, like Gimp or PhotoShop.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Derek Jenkins on November 27, 2013 at 7:41am

There is no setting that appears for him. See attached images.

Can I run the new version with the existing license? I don't want to install the new version only to find out I need to purchase a new license for something that should be working with our current license and version.

Attachments:

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on November 27, 2013 at 9:07am

Your license was purchased in 2010, so it will not work with the latest version. If you don't want to renew your license, you can use the method of saving the animation files as images and using another program to stitch them together as an animation.

Set the animation output file name to have a .png extension. Then all the frames will be saved as separate png files in the folder specified.

Then you can use another program to stitch them together, like Gimp or Photoshop to stitch them together.

Gimp is a widely used and recommended free movie program that can be downloaded from this link:

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

You can also use you the little program that I wrote to stitch them together. You can download that from:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/9z0p0brygcpsg58/RpMakeAvi.exe

It uses the same logic we use in IRender nXt to assemble the AVI file. You just run it, select your codec, use Browse specify the folder where you saved the PNG files, and then click Create AVI.