Animation

[ZFact]

Hi;

I have a client who requires a 3 min animation of both internal

and external housing... He wants the animation to be compatible

on all media... dvd, pc, web. widescreen

 

What is the best optimised codec and size for such an animation

and what would be the minimum frames per second you would use?

 

Cheers

[manta]

Keep the project in stills TGA's or Tiffs until you need to export it to each media...because each will require a different codec...

 

Dvd will need to be transcoded to Mpeg2...

 

PC, I would do a WMV and a quictime MOV

 

And the web I would probably do streaming FLV, MOV and WMV just to make sure that everybody can see it...

 

This might seem like a lot of work and even overkill but its not, once its in a program for exporting, its pretty easy to export to all those formats, and it ensures that nobody will come and say " I couldn't see the animation"

[Ernest Burden III]

Keep the project in stills TGA's or Tiffs until you need to export it to each media...

 

Exactly.

 

Also, three minutes isn't a very long time to show both interior and exterior. I've done it, but its hard to not end up with a piece that feels rushed. Best to focus on some details and show them well, and slowly. You should try to find a storyline that helps you show off the building.

 

If you look at the entries to the 3D Awards you will find many good examples (and a few bad ones). Watch them, see what works and figure out how to adapt what was good to your project.

[Brian Smith]

Paul,

If you're interested, check out this link and click on 'Sample Chapter'...it just so happens to be on the subject you're interested in.

 

http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590595572

[ZFact]

Keep the project in stills TGA's or Tiffs until you need to export it to each media...because each will require a different codec...

quote]

 

 

Does the file size not end up massive if you use tiff's... how does

after effects handle such large files and how long will it take AE

to process the stills into a running movie file?

 

Thanks

[ZFact]

and how many frames per second can you get away with?

[Ernest Burden III]

Does the file size not end up massive if you use tiff's... how does

after effects handle such large files and how long will it take AE

to process the stills into a running movie file?

 

To compress three minutes takes Premiere anywhere from five minutes for Windows Media to 20 minutes for Quicktime. So build in a day at the end to compress, test, transmit, burn CDs, etc.

 

A TIF at DVD resolution should be about 1MB. Hard-drives are cheap.

 

You are probably in a PAL country, so the standard is 25fps. You could probably get away with less, but at 15fps you start to notice the lower rate. Its not worth making your hard work look less-than-professional with a too-low framerate. Nils from Neoscape posted recently that they are working at 25fps, but that under NTSCs 30fps, so its not much lower. For PAL, maybe 20fps. But I would suggest you go with 25fps. You could always run some tests at 15, 20 and 25 to see what you are comfortable with. Nils said the reason for the slightly lower rate was to get room for less compression within the same bitrate.

[ZFact]

To compress three minutes takes Premiere anywhere from five minutes for Windows Media to 20 minutes for Quicktime. So build in a day at the end to compress, test, transmit, burn CDs, etc.

 

A TIF at DVD resolution should be about 1MB. Hard-drives are cheap.

 

You are probably in a PAL country, so the standard is 25fps. You could probably get away with less, but at 15fps you start to notice the lower rate. Its not worth making your hard work look less-than-professional with a too-low framerate. Nils from Neoscape posted recently that they are working at 25fps, but that under NTSCs 30fps, so its not much lower. For PAL, maybe 20fps. But I would suggest you go with 25fps. You could always run some tests at 15, 20 and 25 to see what you are comfortable with. Nils said the reason for the slightly lower rate was to get room for less compression within the same bitrate.

 

 

I rendered out 21 seconds as a tiff sequence at 20 frmaes per second, but

when i import this into AE, its cutting my time down to 14 seconds which

would suggest it has imported as a 30 frame per second sequence... I have

stretched the time out to the 21 second mark but I heard in the past this

is not a good way of extending stills.... any advice on the matter?

[quizzy]

**moved here**

 

I'm doing a 3 minute animation right now. A few details:

 

frame rate: 25fps

resolution: 640x480

image format: JPG and TGA if I need alpha channel

 

I comp everything in AE and render out to uncompressed AVI for further compression to different media.

I end up with an 4.4GB AVI which I drag and drop into my DVD-burning software and let that software compress it to the highest quality DVD.

 

For web-viewing I usually go with MOV or WMV. MOV if my client want apple users to see the file. But all re-compression to different formats out of that 4.4GB AVI is quite fast..

 

As to widescreen, you propably have to re-render or make sure your PAL format has enough margins at the bottom, top, or both to be able to crop to widescreen format..

[manta]

Just go to composition settings and change the frame rate to whatever you want....

[ZFact]

That doesnt work... it changes the frame rate of the project not

of that particular layer, it remains at 14 seconds!!

 

i can stretch the time but apparently its not a good thing to do

 

any other suggestions

[manta]

So if you start a new composition, making sure its set to 20fps and import your still sequence, drag it on to the timeline, it stays at 30fps, that's really strange, I'll experiment with that when I get a chance...

[Nils Norgren]

Nils from Neoscape posted recently that they are working at 25fps

 

To be precise we are working at 23.976 fps (which is a standard HD frame rate, closest to 24 fps which is film speed)

 

Along with all of the above points about compression, my advice is to render the frames you need for the frame rate you are going to master , in your case 25 fps (your playback compressions could drop the frame rate for internet playback). As for the file size, the best thing to do is bite the bullet and render all the frames to TGA's with LZW compression. We have in the past rendered to JPEGS, with the highest quality (I don't recommend it unless it is absolutely necessary to conserve disk space). If file size is not an issue then render to a 32 bit format (like .exr) for control later on in post.

 

Here are a couple of things to consider when rendering out the animation.

 

Can things be broken into short shots? This has many downstream benefits, you can manage your effort through the file structure, organizing the sequential files into sub folders per scene and per shot. Also if there is a problem you may only have to re-render a few frames (instead of thousands) Making patches becomes easier.

 

If it is possible render layers, Just like photoshop you can render things in passes and manage more in the composite instead of 3d, render layers are great but that is not what I am talking about, I mean render a sky pass, a building pass, a tree pass and a car pass, this takes planning and careful use of matte-shadow materials etc. In the end it can save time both in re-renders and in scene management. You can also color correct the objects separately, and add 2d effects like bloom and glow with more control.

 

finally in my short list of suggestions, Try not to spend time with the camera traveling to areas of interest, Animation is difficult and expensive, if you spend all your time traversing sites, or flying down halls, or turning corners to reach a vantage point, you are spinning your (expensive) wheels to make something less interesting and often much more difficult.

 

An example is, a shot across a large site with many buildings may have a prominent feature in the middle of the frame, cut to a camera looking up at the same feature from up close, then the next short camera move takes us in to some other small feature, or reveals another distant object that catches our attention, perhaps a view, suddenly we are looking at that view from different vista only to pull back and reveal we are in a unit, looking out at the view.

 

Hope that any of this helps with the effort, one thing that is a big help would be a storyboard.

 

an ounce of plan is worth a pound of execution, (my corny adaptation)

 

-Nils

 

ps. also only build models that you will absolutely need, be stingy with all you resources.

[Charles Gaushell]

**moved here**

 

image format: JPG and TGA if I need alpha channel

 

 

We render out to 24 bit or if needed for alpha 32 bit PNG files. Premiere and AE both love them. Smaller than tiff/tga and no jaggies like with jpg.

[ihabkal]

We render out to 24 bit or if needed for alpha 32 bit PNG files. Premiere and AE both love them. Smaller than tiff/tga and no jaggies like with jpg.

 

I render to PNG too and it works great. at 32bit it uses around half a megabyte for 720x480 so it is half the size of a comparable Tiff/TGA without any loss of quality.

[ihabkal]

To be precise we are working at 23.976 fps (which is a standard HD frame rate, closest to 24 fps which is film speed)

 

Along with all of the above points about compression, my advice is to render the frames you need for the frame rate you are going to master , in your case 25 fps (your playback compressions could drop the frame rate for internet playback). As for the file size, the best thing to do is bite the bullet and render all the frames to TGA's with LZW compression. We have in the past rendered to JPEGS, with the highest quality (I don't recommend it unless it is absolutely necessary to conserve disk space). If file size is not an issue then render to a 32 bit format (like .exr) for control later on in post.

 

Here are a couple of things to consider when rendering out the animation.

 

Can things be broken into short shots? This has many downstream benefits, you can manage your effort through the file structure, organizing the sequential files into sub folders per scene and per shot. Also if there is a problem you may only have to re-render a few frames (instead of thousands) Making patches becomes easier.

 

If it is possible render layers, Just like photoshop you can render things in passes and manage more in the composite instead of 3d, render layers are great but that is not what I am talking about, I mean render a sky pass, a building pass, a tree pass and a car pass, this takes planning and careful use of matte-shadow materials etc. In the end it can save time both in re-renders and in scene management. You can also color correct the objects separately, and add 2d effects like bloom and glow with more control.

 

finally in my short list of suggestions, Try not to spend time with the camera traveling to areas of interest, Animation is difficult and expensive, if you spend all your time traversing sites, or flying down halls, or turning corners to reach a vantage point, you are spinning your (expensive) wheels to make something less interesting and often much more difficult.

 

An example is, a shot across a large site with many buildings may have a prominent feature in the middle of the frame, cut to a camera looking up at the same feature from up close, then the next short camera move takes us in to some other small feature, or reveals another distant object that catches our attention, perhaps a view, suddenly we are looking at that view from different vista only to pull back and reveal we are in a unit, looking out at the view.

 

Hope that any of this helps with the effort, one thing that is a big help would be a storyboard.

 

an ounce of plan is worth a pound of execution, (my corny adaptation)

 

-Nils

 

ps. also only build models that you will absolutely need, be stingy with all you resources.

 

Hi Nils, thanks for the tips. It would be amazing if someday you can make a How to book for making interesting architectural animation (and stills). You guys are the masters of this trade, everyone would benefit from such a publication.

[Ernest Burden III]

To be precise we are working at 23.976 fps (which is a standard HD frame rate, closest to 24 fps which is film speed)

 

I apologize. I should have gone back to the original post before making a statement about what you are doing.

 

And its not a small distinction. Rendering to film rate makes a lot of sense, since DVD software and players are made to deal with film rate material.

 

What is different about a PNG file that makes it half the size of a TIF but still lossless? I think TIF is RLE encoded, which means the size varies with complexity. My files do not compress very much because I'm adding noise, so there's never a long run length of identical pixels.

[Nils Norgren]

I apologize. I should have gone back to the original post before making a statement about what you are doing.

 

Thanks Ernest, I don't mean to be a nit-picker, the point is that it is best to render the frame rate you are going to finish in. One of my pet peeves is time-remapping to make something longer, there are circumstances where it is appropiate (specifically pauses, no reason render 24 of the same frame for a 1 second pause). On a whole it is best to get the frames of your animation worked out and render every frame and then composite, color grade and edit. One other general point for animation - for a film feel there should always be motion blur.

 

Hi Nils, thanks for the tips. It would be amazing if someday you can make a How to book for making interesting architectural animation (and stills). You guys are the masters of this trade, everyone would benefit from such a publication.

 

Ihab, thanks for the props, I don' know if I am up for a book. I hope to finish and make public some sort of version of the presentation I gave at the DVC in Boston this year, things are as crazy as ever, so things that are important but not urgent often get ignored.

 

-Nils