Possible Issues:
- Missing codecs, or very limited selection
- Missing Compression setting button in Maya
- Skewed AVI's once generated
- Maya error message 'Unable to create video track. Check format.'
Playblast issues have shown up in Maya since 2011 and / or Maya under Windows7 and a lot of people on many forums, and indeed at our studio, have been moaning about this for a while, I thought it was about time to put a few answers out there....
Codecs:
The first problem is that most of the codecs that you're used to seeing in XP/Vista won't be there in Win7, so if you're used to playblasting Xvid/DivX then you need to do a little bit extra to get these back.The fix is to hook Maya up with the FFDShow encoder, usually distributed via codec packs like K-Lite or Cole2K. Once you've installed one of these you'll see a new compressor show up in Maya, 'FFDS', this is the ffdshow video encoder.
In Maya2011 they also missed out the button that lets you setup compression settings like you could in Maya2010, you can choose the codec, but not set any options! You can by-pass this issue though, if you enter the following in the script editor:
playblast -compression ""
Now the standard Windows compression UI will pop up, letting you set the compression options (for FFDS this'll actually pop up the ffdsVFW encoder UI. If you don't do this then you can set the encoder up by opening the FFDSVFW window which you'll find under your windows Start>K-Lite>ffdsVFW
Here you can once again get access to most of your standard codecs like Xvid,DivX etc. We tend to set ours up to something like the following:
Skewed Avi's or Unable to Generate errors:
These 2 symptoms are both linked, and not actually Maya's fault. If you try and compress an Xvid then the compressor is expecting the AVI to be on height and width bounds that are of multiples of 4 (if memory serves me correctly!).
So if you try and blast 640*480 all is good, if you do 641*480 you'll get the 'unable to generate' error, if you do 642*480 you get a skewed movie...so movie sizes under xvid/divx and ffds can give either a skewed avi, or the dreaded 'Unable to create video track' message. This basically means that the codec couldn't make the avi at the given size. The best thing to do is to use a Custom window size (or render settings) and stick to it.
Anyway, enough, hope that helps a few folk.
Mark
Great, this helped me out alot. Did not understand what was wrong as the files i Playblasted worked fine in all mediaplayers i got except for VLC and the guys that were gonna use the files could not convert them to the format they needed. Defining custom display size solved the problem. Great blog btw, gonna check in here if i run into more problems :)
ReplyDeleteMe and a couple of friends have just started our own game studio and are still hitting some bumps in the pipeline of our first production.
Best Regards,
Magnus
When playblast the animation, what kind of codec do you guys usually use? The playblasted video should be able to playback on quicktime so it can go frame by frame. Any suggestion?
ReplyDeletethankx a lot Mark:)
ReplyDeleteHello !
ReplyDeleteThank you for your valuable info.. I am facing some other problem though... I am using Maya 2012 32 bit and I have Win 7 home basic on my laptop with jus 2GB ram .. Whenever I try to playblast my animation .. maya does it properly bt I cant see any output..though pop up window comes quickly...its happening wid all th formats..i.e qt or avior iff.. I tried setting up according to above mentioned settings bt..I am not getting any output even if the player is open...it just plays blank file..Help me..
Thanks so much, the skewed/grayed out playblast has been a constant pain.
ReplyDeleteThis info has been really helpful !