New in Cinema 4D R19: Release 19 Media Core offers Native MP4, Animated GIF, and more

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Instructor Cineversity

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  • Duration: 04:50
  • Views: 12344
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

An all-new media core in C4D Release 19 includes native MP4, Animated GIF, improved OpenEXR and more.

The all-new media core in Cinema 4D Release 19 natively supports more image, video and audio formats, and it’s faster and more memory-efficient than ever before. You can use MP4 files as textures without any need for Quicktime, and they load and play in near-realtime. Render previews directly to MP4 as well, complete with audio.
All the supported formats have been optimized and improved, with support for more compressions types and variants. You can now import and export DDS files for game texturing, save TIF files with compression, and utilize the latest compression algorithms for OpenEXR files.
Finally, you can now import and use Animated GIF files as textures, and in this tutorial you’ll see a preview of the soon-to-be-released CV-Giphy plugin from Cineversity that makes it easy to get Animated GIFs from the popular web service.

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Transcript

When you import or export, images, video and sound in Cinema 4D Release 19, you'll be using tomorrow's technology, a new media engine that was developed as part of MAXON's overall effort to modernize Cinema 4D's core. This means that regardless of which format you use, you'll enjoy a faster performance, better memory management, and more robust support of the features of each format. Probably the most exciting thing that's come out of this, though, is native support for MP4 video. And that means that Windows users don't need to rely on QuickTime anymore. It also means that you'll get incredibly fast playback of MP4s directly in the interface. There's no need to re-save your videos as sequenced images. Now, of course, Cinema 4D plays back images great once they're cached into memory. The real question is, how fast can it cache that image format into memory? Let's go ahead and load a new video so that you can see how well this performs. I'm going to go ahead and load this demo reel. And we'll go ahead and start playback. And you can see that already we're getting near real-time playback, immediately on the first load of this video file. Not only that, but we're getting this great playback with all of the fantastic reflections and viewport features that have been added in Cinema 4D Release 19. And, of course, once that video is fully cached into the RAM, it'll playback even faster in the viewport. Now, in addition to MP4 import, we can natively export or render to MP4 files as well. And, I find this comes in super handy for preview renders. Now, you'll notice here in the render settings that the format options are now under a twirl arrow, rather than in a separate modal dialogue. That provides easier access and it also allows you to set up specific presets for each format. So you can quickly access the specific format options for your workflow. And I think it's really great to be able to quickly export a fantastic looking preview render that's already in MP4, ready to share with clients, upload to the web or view in virtually any media player. Now, of course, the picture viewer itself is a media player, and MP4 playback in the picture viewer is fantastic as well. I'm going to load a 4K MP4 here that I've been working on for the spherical camera project. Can't even fit it in the picture viewer, it's so huge. But I can play it back in real-time in the picture viewer with audio and that, I think, is fantastic. Now in addition to MP4, you can now directly write DBS files for game workflows. And all of the formats have been touched to eliminate any of the issues that people have reported with those files as well as add additional functionality. One great example is EXR, which has added the DWAA compression and also has a new option to disable the layer numbering that Cinema 4D previously wrote into EXR layers. And that makes it super easy to integrate our EXR output into any studio workflow. So, there's lots of great new enhancements, but there's one more I specifically have to mention, and it's a lot of fun. You can now load animated GIFs as textures for Cinema 4D. And I couldn't imagine a better way to show you that than using GIPHY, the internet's source for all things animated GIF. So, I created a quick little plugin that we'll be putting on Cineversity for all of the MAXON service agreement customers, that will allow you to quickly download animated GIFs related to whatever search term you choose. Now, of course, you don't need the plugin to use animated GIFs, but the plugin makes it fun because you can pull it directly from GIPHY. And now we have our multi-shader here, with all of our animated GIFs set up, you can see that the animation frames are all set up. Also, fractional frame rates are now supported with all video formats. Let's go and apply this to the cloner object, and now you can see that we've got all those cool animated GIFs playing back directly in the viewport. So, that's a quick look at some of the nice features that have been added in Cinema 4D Release 19 with the new media engine. And, of course, make sure to watch all of our quick start videos here on Cineversity, as well as all of the quick tip and reference videos that'll be coming in the next few months, so that you can learn how to get the most out of Cinema 4D, Release 19.
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