Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/08/21/cracked-it-i-just-got-blender-to-output-sound-and-video-to-the-same-file-and-it-plays-back-in-quicktime/

Thank you so much higginsdj I just tried the settings you suggest here..  FFMpeg QuickTime H.264 export only works in VLC…? – Blender Artists Forums   ..and I got Blender to output a 3D animation with sound. Just click that play button and watch this tiny little test animation strut his stuff.

OK it might not look like much to you but this animation is in a format that most people can play (Quicktime), it has sound, it’s less than a megabyte in size, it works smoothly and it rendered in about ten minutes and that all makes me very very happy indeed. I’ve used higginsdj’s settings as a starting point and tried to shrink the amount of data being packed away in the .mov file even more, and the results speak, or rather meow, for themselves.

So what are my magical working video settings for Blender, well…

The most important setting here is ffmpeg, it’s the only one in Blender that will output sound with your animation. The rest of the settings I left at default, then I pressed the preview button and it changed things like the Asp X: setting to give me a nice small web-friendly animation. Our job isn’t done yet though, next we click the video tab that can be seen peeking out at the top of this little block of buttons.

Two important settings here, we need to set Quicktime as the format, and also we need to chose H264 as the codec. I’m not one hundred percent sure that every machine has this codec, but I think it ended up on my laptop because about half a year ago I downloaded a free version of it that I found, I think on sourceforge. For me anyway, with my XP machine this is working, right now – but I know codecs are a dark art, all I can say is good luck.

Now we want to hear our cute animated characters make noises so we click the audio tab next.

First push the giant “Multiplex audio” button, otherwise nothing will happen, and then you chose a codec.

And would ya believe it, using a simple mp3 codec works a charm. As usual I left all the other values at default. Even though that bitrate looks a little on the high side to me, Blender is still turning out nice small 3D animations in no time flat and, as the saying goes, if it aint broke, don’t fix it.

It now seems to me that I was completely incompetent, trying out so many different combinations of settings, but then the answer always seems so easy when you find it. I hope this little run through is useful to you if you are on the same weeks-long quest that I was, the quest to render a working 3D animation with sound that is small enough for the web and formatted in something like a popular file type,,, cue heavenly quire,,, mission accomplished.