3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [509]
The Video Post interface, like the Render Scene dialog box (covered in Chapter 23, “Rendering a Scene and Enabling Quicksilver”), provides another way to produce final output. You can think of the Video Post process as an artistic assembly line. As the image moves down the line, each item in the queue adds an image, drops a rendered image on the stack, or applies a filter effect. This process continues until the final output event is reached.
The Video Post interface, shown in Figure 49.8, includes a toolbar, a pane of events and ranges, and a status bar. You can open it by choosing Rendering⇒Video Post.
FIGURE 49.8
The Video Post interface lets you composite images with your final rendering.
In many ways, the Video Post interface is similar to the Track View interfaces. Each event is displayed as a track in the Queue pane to the left. To the right is the Range pane, where the range for each track is displayed as lines with square boxes at each end. You can edit these ranges by dragging the squares on either end. The time bar, above the Range pane, displays the frames for the current sequence, and the status bar at the bottom of the interface includes information and view buttons.
The Video Post toolbar
At the top of the Video Post interface is a toolbar with several buttons for managing the Video Post features. Table 49.1 shows and explains these buttons.
The Video Post Queue and Range panes
Below the toolbar are the Video Post Queue and Range panes. The Queue pane is on the left; it lists all the events to be included in the post-processing sequence in the order in which they are processed. You can rearrange the order of the events by dragging an event in the queue to its new location.
You can select multiple events by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking the event names, or you can select one event, hold down the Shift key, and click another event to select all events between the two.
Each event has a corresponding range that appears in the Range pane to the right. Each range is shown as a line with a square on each end. The left square marks the first frame of the event, and the right square marks the last frame of the event. You can expand or contract these ranges by dragging the square on either end of the range line.
If you click the line between two squares, you can drag the entire range. If you drag a range beyond the given number of frames, then additional frames are added.
The time bar is at the top of the Range pane. This bar shows the number of total frames included in the animation. You can also slide the time bar up or down to move it closer to a specific track by dragging it.
The Video Post status bar
The status bar includes a prompt line, several value fields, and some navigation buttons. The fields to the right of the prompt line include Start, End, Current Frames, and the Width and Height of the image. The navigation buttons include (in order from left to right) Pan, Zoom Extents, Zoom Time, and Zoom Region.
Working with Sequences
All the events that are added to the Queue pane make up a sequence. You can save these sequences and open them at a later time. The Execute Sequence button (Ctrl+R), found on the toolbar, starts the compositing process.
Note
The keyboard shortcuts for the Video Post interface work only if the Keyboard Shortcut Override Toggle on the main toolbar is enabled. •
To save a sequence, click the Save button on the toolbar to open the Save Sequence dialog box, where you can save the queue sequence. Sequences are saved along with the Max file when the scene is saved, but they can also be saved independently of the scene. By default, these files are saved with the .vpx extension in the vpost directory.