From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

Playing an image sequence with the RAM Player - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Playing an image sequence with the RAM Player

“

- [Instructor] In the previous exercise, we saved out a sequence of images, 150 separate files, each a still frame from this animation. We want to view that image sequence as a motion picture, as a movie. We can do that using a tool called the RAM Player. It's found in the Rendering menu, at the very bottom, Compare Media in RAM Player. Open that up, and we get a window. The menu item says compare media because RAM Player has two channels: Channel A and Channel B. We could load in two different sequences and compare them. We only want to load in one right now to view it. Click on the folder to open Channel A. We should be taken to the Render Output folder in the current project. Navigate to your image sequence. I've got one here, Camera Arc Sequence Example. Go inside there, and there are 150 still frames. Select the first frame in the sequence, and at the bottom of the window, double check to make sure that the sequence check box is enabled, and click open. We get a dialog in which we can choose which frames to load. We want to load them all, so we'll just go right past this one. Click OK. Then we get another dialog in which we have the option to downgrade the resolution or limit the amount of memory used. We're not going to do either of those. Again just click OK, and the frames start loading into system memory. It'll take a few seconds to load all 150 frames from disk. Once that's done, we can play the sequence back at different frame rates. Press play, and we'll see it at the default, 30 frames per second. We can change that frame rate. Maybe set it to half or 15 frames per second, and analyze that. Sometimes we can spot things that we wouldn't see when playing the sequence at the original frame rate. Okay, we can stop, and when we close the RAM Player, we get a dialog asking, do you really want to do this? All files that are currently in memory will be unloaded. If we click okay here, then if we wanted to watch this movie again, we'd have to load it back into RAM, but that's okay. This dialog is another leftover from when computers were a lot slower, and it took a lot longer to load a sequence into RAM. We're going to exit out of here, so just click OK, and that's how to view an image sequence with the RAM Player.

Contents