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[thecolclough]

I know I haven't been posting many WIPs around here for the last few years... sorry about the silence.  I'm still busy making films, but I've mostly been working in stopmotion or live action, so posting the results here would have been somewhat off-topic. 

However, I've now found a little project where I can use Anim8or again: my 'film studio' logos need an overhaul.

Between the 24mpix DSLR I bought two years ago, and the Win10 monster rig I built (well, had built for me) last year running Vegas Pro, I can now - in theory - produce animation in any format I like up to cinematic 4K, 4096 x 2160.  I might not be able to push CGI work that far, depending on render times, but it should at least be feasible for stopmotion.  Only problem is, my first 4K Vegas export tests confirmed what I'd already suspected, namely that my current logos, which only exist in 720p, are going to let the side down if I try using them on a 4K production, so they need re-doing.

The current versions have been doing good service since early 2010, appearing on several dozen videos, and one of the two is going to stay basically the same except re-rendered at higher resolution.  The other, however, would be prohibitively slow to render at 4K as the design uses ART refractions (the 720p render was already a killer, and cinematic 4K would have nearly 10 times the pixel count!), and I'm getting a bit bored with the current design anyway and I fancy replacing it with something a bit more colourful and dynamic, so there's a ground-up redesign in the works.

I made the mistake of trying to re-render most of the first logo as a single uncompressed AVI file earlier this evening... despite a mere 6-second runtime (144 frames) it turned out to be a 3.7-gigabyte monster and Vegas point-blank refused to open it, so I'm now re-doing it as a sequence of PNGs.  I've attached a sample frame at full resolution, and I'll try to remember to post the odd update as the other one gets underway too.  Got to say, having seen how this logo is turning out, I kinda wish I had a new CGI short film in the works... well, watch this space, I guess! 

[daniel99]

I also had some 4K projects, but I've combined some techniques to make a photorealistic render in Scanline. Fortunately, in my case, I didn't need to have reflections or refractions.
And yeah, 4k files are huge, no matter if you export png, jpg, mp4 or mov.
But good job.

[selden]

Fortunately, the pricing for large disk drives is almost reasonable (~$125/6TB) if you're willing to use consumer grade devices in a RAID array. You'll have to pay a premium for enterprise or 10TB disks, though.

[daniel99]

selden Also true!

[thecolclough]

the PNG frames are still pretty big files, but mercifully far smaller than the raw AVI.  Vegas is working with them without any complaints so far.  they're not putting too much strain on my HDD capacity - yet - as I've got a pair of 4TB Western Digital Blacks in RAID 1.  atm there's an hour-long full-HD live action project whose working directory is hogging 1.5TB, but that's nearly finished and i'm planning to offload it onto an external drive soon, which should free up plenty of space for ongoing short-form animation productions.

[daniel99]

thecolclough Usually I export png sequences, and most of the time I save/re-export the files into MOV files compressed with PNG compression or Photo-JPED compression. Also, I found very useful to have them MP4 files with H.264.
But yeah, sometimes an external disk drive comes handy

[thecolclough]

i just realised something... clever clogs here basically forgot i had this thread open, and never posted any images from my new main logo.  duh.  well, better late than never, i guess...

i went off up a creative dead end at first, trying and failing to design something clockwork-looking, which resulted in the horrible cluttered mess you can see in the image below.

the final draft has a bunch of floating segments which circle around and gradually fit together into a complete ring with the text in front - the server won't let me post with all of the attachments at once, so the finished stills will have to follow on another post.  stay tuned.

the video runs 10 seconds in total (although i often use a cut-down version on shorter projects), and was rendered as a PNG sequence using Scanline in v1.0 Beta 2 - if i remember correctly - over the course of... well, quite a few hours

[thecolclough]

...apparently i can't upload any more pics at the moment, so i'll have to come back and upload the stills from the finished logo vid tomorrow or something...

[thecolclough]

server doesn't seem to want to let me upload the stills from the finished logo in 4K after all that, so here are some 2K versions instead

[Trevor]

its another example of needing multi-threading/core
funny thing I found was that I made a test app with 4 threads expecting them to use 4 cores but unfortunately they all stayed on 1 core, so multi-threading and multi-core is slightly different even though I thought that the OS took threads and spread them over cores...


trev