Animation Workflow

[Macer]

Just wondering what workflow everyone else uses for animations?

 

I typically render out different camera sequences from Max to .rpf’s, add effects and/or corrections in Combustion and export as .tif’s. These are then imported into Premiere Pro and titles and transitions etc are added before exporting as .wmv or .mpg for pc use, or dvd depending upon client requirements. Sometimes I leave out the Combustion step and just take rendered tif’s straight into premiere pro.

 

This workflow seems to be ok for us at the moment, but it does consume quite a bit of hard disk space.

 

One of the main issues that I have is output quality from premiere pro. If I import the images as a sequence (check the image seq box on import) then the output quality is a lot lower than if I actually import every single image file into premiere pro. This drop in quality is very obvious (but I suppose if you didn’t compare them side by side you may never know!), possibly most noticeable in .wmv format. Has anyone else come across this?

 

The work around is to do what I said above and import every single image (ie select them all instead of selecting one and checking the image sequence box). But this has its own issues, now you can’t treat each sequence as a single clip (each frame is viewed as a single clip), so this affects the way that you apply filters and transitions etc. It’s a right pain.

 

Does this affect anyone else? Or do people use very different workflows?

 

I have been considering trying to skip premiere pro and do it all in combustion but I’m not familiar enough with this aspect of it yet.

 

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

[Nic H]

We normally render from max / vray to tga's or exr's depending on project and amount of post that is going to be done (i.e matching plates / live footage)

 

Also also render lots of elements (reflection, specular, diffuse, gi, zdepth, dirt etc) Sometimes we jsut build up over the main pass and sometimes rebuild teh mainpass from scratch using all the elements. Once again depends of the flexibility and style we are aiming for.

 

We use Fusion or composting / color correct then export as 10 bit uncompressed quicktimes that go into Final Cut for editing / sound. This is exported once again to a master 10 bit quicktime and various sizes / quality quicktimes are done out of Sorenson Squeeze from here (need to double check that)

 

I wouldnt worry about the disk storage sizes, just buy some more storage. Its very cheap.

 

Looks like you are doing it correctly from what I can see. Except .WMV is a shitty format.

[Macer]

Thanks for the input.

 

"Except .WMV is a shitty format"

 

Yeah, I wasn't too sure about it, but a lot of our work ends up being viewed via CD's on PC's. Virtually all of our clients are PC based (not Mac) and most of them aren't too clued up, so .wmv on cd (normally around 1280 x 720 pixels) using the default windows media player seemed to play smoothly from the disc with minimum of compatability/codec issues.

 

I'm not too sure what else would work well in this situation? Compatability has to come first, followed by quality (unfortunately!). Mpeg 4 maybe, but not too sure on codec compatability.

 

Any suggestions?

 

I really should look into rendering elements, but haven't had a chance to figure out how to layer them back up in combustion.

 

Cheers

[pmaric]

Hey Nic,

 

I have a question about your post.

 

"Also also render lots of elements (reflection, specular, diffuse, gi, zdepth, dirt etc) Sometimes we jsut build up over the main pass and sometimes rebuild teh mainpass from scratch using all the elements."

 

When you are building up the elements (reflection, specular, etc...) over the main pass, what program are you using to do this? Are you using photoshop to assemble each frame, then exporting all frames to premiere(or another program) to put your animation together?

[Nic H]

its done in either shake or fusion, sometimes after effects.

any compositing or motion graphics package can do it.

[DanGrover]

I think the problem with your issue at the bottom of the OP there is to do with the exporting software for your format within Premiere.

 

I don't know about WMV, but I know for most MOV compression type4s (h264, mpeg4 etc) a lot of the "tricks" it uses to get compression involve looking both forwards and backwards from the current frame it's compressing. If you've imported an image sequence, it might struggle to do this (or even if they are individual images). This is because, with the transitions and stuff, it renders the images as it goes - thus, it cannot "look" at the ones in front of the current frame because they havent been rendered yet, and thus a lot of the tricks cannot be used.

 

As such, what I do is export from my video editing software (I used Vegas, but it's all the same) as another uncompression video format - such as uncompressed or 100% animation .mov. For 3 minutes, this will be approx 20GB. Huge, obviously, but if you then use Quicktime Pro to export it out as a file format you like (such as the aforementioned h264 or mpeg4) then because all the rendering is done, it can do all its tricks. As such, you'll end up with much smaller file sizes AND often a better looking output.

 

It's an annoying extra step, but well worth it in my view.

[pmaric]

Thanks Nic for the software suggestions!