I am trying to render an animation in carrara which has a sound track added to it. It is a .wav file which carrara supports.
However when I try to render the file when I try .avi format which is the format I want to save the movie as.Carrara states that it is a unsupport format for sound.
The only one which works is Quicktime.
But I want to work in avi.
Does anyone know which codec will work other than quicktime.
Also when you click play on the time line no sound is heard. Does carrara not support playback of sound in the time line?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Surprised no-one has replied! I haven't a clue but, reading the help file, would suggested that UNCOMPRESSED Wav files should work with .avi. Hope that is of some help.

Hmm, I've not played with sound before but can't get AVI work with any of the codecs I've got. Quicktime is fine. The only solution I can think of is for you to get Quicktime Pro. This will allow you to export the quicktime movie as an avi. Carrara allows you to scrub a sound by dragging the cursor that is at the beginning of each sound in the sequencer, but there's no playback during animation preview.

Interestingly I've just opened the AVI I exported from QTPro in Carrara and the sound played fine. So this looks like a bug.

Thanks falconperigot Looks as if only quicktime is support for sound. If thats the case not that impressed. I can get round it by adding the sound after rendering & using my video editing program to add the sound. Was hoping to do it all in carrara. Ive created a talking figure in poser 6 using mimic for lip sync.I then import into carrara for further work. Also found that transposer does not import the sound file. I have to add it after. Was hoping that I could save time by doing all the final animation work in carrrara 5 pro.

Yeah, I have the impression that Eovia don't treat sound in Carrara as a priority. There's been no improvement in C5 from C4, and the fact that there's no preview playback makes the whole thing a bit gimmicky. Personally I think the best working method is to output numbered stills which are then put together in a video editor. It gives the best results but is more time consuming.

Interesting what bwtr said about uncompressed wave file. Just checked the help file & it uses the words uncompressed microsoft wave file. Interesting what do they mean by uncompressed? I`ve looked at my audio editing program & you have the options of PCM etc mono/stereo but no mention of uncompressed.

You can save WAV files with compression such as MPEG (the same compression method as MP3 files). Carrara simply won't import them.

PCM (pulse-code modulation) refers to the sampling method which is the way that an analogue sound signal (which is has continuos pitch variations) is converted to digital (which has stepped pitch variations). The higher the sampling rate and the greater the quantization, the better the sound quality. But that's nothing to do with compression which reduces file size by removing redundancy [the sounds you can't hear or that are repeated in such a way that they can be stored in fewer bits].

HTH,
Mark

Message edited on: 01/12/2006 05:07

Message edited on: 01/12/2006 05:08

Yes.I see what you are saying. And when compressed they are then not .wav files but have a different extension i.e. .mp3 depending on the codec used. Which makes you wonder why say uncompressed wave files. When compressed it is not a wave file but an mp3 file or what ever. The sound file I`ve used is a .wav file.It is imported by carrara,so it is of the correct type for carrara. It still looks like carrara only saves sound in Quicktime. As you said a bit gimmicky. Back to the long way round.

No, they still have the WAV extension. Try this file; you should be able to play it using Windows Media Player but it won't load into Carrara. Be sure to change the extension to WAV. I saved it from my audio editing program (Goldwave - excellent and inexpensive! www.goldwave.com) using the Wave MPEG Layer-3 8kBit/s, 8,000Hz, Mono option, which is the lowest sampling rate so it sounds crappy. It is some applause (clapping). MP3 is the same compression method but a different file format (in other words, different encoding of the binary). And all this makes no difference to Carrara's output - you can't render to AVI with sound. :(

See what you mean. Carrara would not load it. I shall have to contact eovia.It`s about time they upgraded the sound support. Thanks for your support Derek

Trying to clarify. Will any app add a .wav (or any sound) to an .avi file and save it as an.avi? The nearest that I can come up with also is the (?free) Windows Movie Maker and this saves as an .wmv file! Please, if it is not possible to save sound to an avi and then save as an avi, in any app, will someone confirm.

As an aside, a recently made avi was 143,181KB which, converted to MP4, was only 3112KB! I think avi is heading for the scrap heap.

bwtr, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. It is possible to have sound in an .avi file, it's just that for some reason Carrara won't do it. If you want to use Carrara to add the sound you'll have to use the .mov format and then use a program like Quicktime Pro to convert to avi. Alternatively you could add the sound separately in a video editor. For the best compression the new Quicktime H264 codec takes a lot of beating. To get that you'll need to download Quicktime 7.

What I am suggesting is that Carrara not being able to add sound to an avi is normal and not a Carrara weakness! Can it be done in any app without the roundabout way you suggested?

Any video editor that can save to .avi will be able to do it. But you'd need to use a video editor so that your sound clip could be aligned correctly with your animation.

I beleive this is because avi for many years was traditionally image only. Both wav and avi have great quality, but are enormous. I just think it is older support. I think the psd format is also still old(2.5).You would still probably need to edit tho. Car is not going to give you all the track, mixer and editing features anyway.But since you can convert many things from avi it wouldn't be bad idea.