CFX Animations - A Guide
 

I think that the movie quality from CFX-POST could be better. So I've made this workaround to create high quality videos. Have a look at http://users.cybercity.dk/~ida3068/c...deo_in_CFX.pdf

Any comments? - Michael Bo

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

This is excellent, I'll have to give it a try! It would be interesting to see if you can get the same quality using the Screen Capture option to generate the images. For large cases it takes a long time to print the images from CFX-Post, but Screen Captures are a lot faster. Mike

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

Yeah, this is the only way to get high quality video's. I use a similar method which uses a batch file which calls CFX-post in batch mode using a session file. Its pretty quick as it doesn't load the files on screen.

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

Michael, This may be obvious, but how do you run scripts in CFX-POST

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

Hi Ogbeni. As written in the guide: Click Session/Play Session... And choose your *.cse file.

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

This is great. I used to generate the animation from Post but the quality is really poor that I give up at the end...

Thanks,Mic.

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

Screen capture is fairly ok for display purpose. If my memory is right, i tried to large image size, say equal or twice of your screen resolution for either png or jpg file format, the animations turn out ok.

Michael, this is great and helpful, thanks

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

FYI, an easy way to get a higher quality MPEG directly from Post-10.0 is to set Quality to High in Animation > Options > Advanced tab. I could not see any artefacts in the resulting MPEG, but the file is 5 times bigger than with the default setting (Medium).

The pdf link is dead ??
 

Hi,Michael Bo Hansen The http://users.cybercity.dk/~ida3068/c...deo_in_CFX.pdf link is dead, would you please re-sent again, thanks!

Re: The pdf link is dead ??
 

I'm sorry about that. Check http://users.cybercity.dk/~ida3068/cfd/ kind regards

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

NB!! Not all windows versions can handle MPEG movies with other size than 640x480. It has to do with the version of DirectX installed on the windows machine. All versions (7.0 is restricted to 640x480). So if you want to be sure that the movie can be seen by all, set the "Image Height" to 480 and "Image width" to 640 in the script.

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

Yes, this is totally overkill.

The default options in CFX Post are setup so that you get a reasonable quality video with a reasonable file size. This makes complete sense.

To get the best quality video out of CFX Post you have to do three things:

- Make sure you use lots of frames between keyframes, especially for transient calculations (1 frame per timestep is the best). More frames = smoother video.

- Save the animation frames to PPM files instead of JPEG on the Animation options panel. JPEG is lossy image format and any movie created from these will be lower quality, PPM is lossless so you will not loose any image quality because of the frame file format. PPM files are however, bigger, so you need more disk space.

- Set the MPEG Quality to High in Animation Options Advanced tab.

Just doing that I've always gotten really really nice looking videos directly from CFX Post.

Neale

Re: CFX Animations - A Guide
 

You can choose to set the quality of the animations to high, but you still will get smoother and smaller file sizes if you take that video and convert it to a mpeg video using bbMPEG (http://members.cox.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html) .