Blender Projects and Studio Themed Intros - Page 14

Thanks Tom. I appreciate the positive feedback. I agree an index to the thread would be nice, maybe someday I'll think about that.

Unfortunately my Fox intro rendered as a 3.99GB .avi and now nothing knows what to do with it. If I had to guess I'm thinking that 4GB is some file size limit in Blender (I know it's not in Windows w/ NTFS) and once it hit that it stopped adding to the file, though Blender threw no errors at all.

I managed to get the file to "play" in some encoder software, and it gets about 2/3 the way through then just stops. Vdub does the same thing opening the file fine, but 2/3 through says something about file I/O error.

I'm thinking I have to split the intro into sections and render it again. I'll probably do 4 chunks of ~175 frames each to keep each one at a reasonable size. Then I can encode each chunk to H.264 or whatever, and then virtual dub should be able to do a direct stream copy of the 4 videos, append them together, and lay the audio down on top of them... Yikes that sounds like too much could go wrong, maybe I should stick to a 720p render

Has anyone else rendered any of these intros (Fox, Universal, Disney, whatever) in 1080p? I'm wondering if anyone else is running into problems?

snofz,
I hadn't been able to figure out how to rig the guy with bones so I hadn't been working on the animation. "Some day" (famous last words) I really do intend to finish a Pixar intro, but as I stated when I posted the teaser shots it would likely be a while and I couldn't make any promises.

I'll gladly upload the new .blend file though if anyone else wants to screw around with it. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing the rigging shouldn't be that hard. This is my latest file with some further tweaking done to the spotlights to get rid of a few earlier glitches.

Right now I've got two bones making up the head, but only the neck bone is movable. The other head bone will move with the neck bone automatically to keep the head in place with respect to the new neck position, while always pointing the lamp at an empty object called "lamp focus". In other words, do not try to move the head, or the head bone, or you might screw up this relationship. Just move the empty object and it will automatically look around for you.

If anyone is able to rig up a workable skeleton definitely let me know, otherwise I'll tinker with it among my many other projects as time allows.

Thanks,
Marc

Well at least I'm not alone anyways. My idea was to render the Fox intro in 4-5 parts then use Premiere and/or Vdub to handle stitching them back together with audio. Plus another tool of course to encode to a more manageable final file size with H.264 or xvid or something. I ran frames 1-150 this morning and just started 151-300, so hopefully it will work out in the end.

I don't know the answer to your question jrl, but on my machine the codecs aren't installed right or something, so Blender can't render to anything useful. I think it's because FFDShow does all of my decoding so I don't have the right encoding codecs registered. I guess I could install a few and see what Blender does with them, but I also like the idea of being able to fine tune the encode after the render.

As it is, Blender is spitting out HUGE raw files, but I can try various ways to encode it after the fact without having to re-render the original.

Well my Fox logo turned out fantastic in 1080p. I was able to stitch all the rendered pieces back together in Premiere, plus add just the audio from my original 720p file.

After Premiere did it's thing Vdub added a fade in and fade out effect for me, and also did the deinterlacing. Finally, after working with everything uncompressed up until this point (on 4-5GB files I might add, yeeouch) I compressed it with H.264/mp3 down to under 12MB.

There are screenshots attached of the old version and the new in case anyone was wondering why I bothered to re-render the whole thing. It had nothing to do with going from 720p->1080p, that was just something I decided to do while I was at it. The real reason was because I never liked the proportions of the text in the original file, and now that I know how to use Blender I decided to change it. Oh and the typo in the "original" screenshot was not in my 720p render. I did actually correct that before rendering the first time, but never took a screenshot after correcting it.

I also just finished a completely different project and attached a screenshot of it as well. This one was a real doosie... I started with the .vob ripped from the DVD, then converted that to an .avi so that After Effects could read it. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to get an uncompressed AVI while keeping the audio or AE would crash, so I had to remove the audio. (In retrospect I should have just compressed the video or something, but I like to work uncompressed up until the very end). In After Effects I covered up the original studio's text with some text that I created in Blender, and saved a new .avi. This .avi went into premiere with yet another .avi that I'd created from the .vob with audio intact, and Premiere spit out the final combined product for me. Finally, a compression with H.264/mp3 and my final file is only ~2MB .

In any case, this last project isn't perfect, there's 3-4 things that I'd really like to improve on, but for a quickie afternoon job I think it turned out good enough. I think I'll be doing a couple more similar to this over the next week as I have the week of from work and they really aren't that hard. Let me know what you guys think!

I just threw together another screenshot of another new project in progress. I don't have all of the animation done on this one yet, as I'm not quite sure how I'm going to finish it. So far I have the original video edited in After Effects to cover up the original producer's name and I have my custom text generated in Blender as you can see. I just don't know how to get my text to come in from behind the other video the way the original intro does it.

I'm thinking I need to tell AE that the solid black background should be transparent or something, so that as the main video recedes to the center of the screen my text will be visible through/over the black. Of course I don't know how to actually use AE yet so good luck with that .

In any case the screenshot shows what the final product will look like, as soon as I figure out how to finish it off.

Very nice Theendisnye. Are those in AE?

I'm going to try my hand at some original intros like you've done after I bang out a few more studios. Basically I'm claiming the low hanging fruit with the studios before I try anything too exotic and original, because I don't yet know how to use the software.

Atagert,
I'm not sure if you mean the flickering of the "shelves" that the letters sit on, or the flickering of the two spotlights (one in center, and one in right). I do not have the flickering of the shelves that some people have, but both of the spotlights do have an annoying flicker. I used an optimized build of Blender 2.46 to do this render, but the spotlight flicker was also in my old render with 2.42a. I have not tried any earlier versions to try and get rid of it.

Also with 2.46 I mentioned there was another rendering problem with both the center and right spotlights. They were initially bright white as if being lit with an extremely intense lamp, instead of the normal golden color. This error was not present when rendered in 2.42a, but to fix it all I had to do was delete the area lamp in front of each one. This made the scene as a whole slightly darker, so I increased the intensity of one of the spotlight lamps just a hair to try and compensate. When compared side by side to a 2.42a render it's still ever so slightly darker, barely even perceptible, but it did render in almost half the time so I'll take it

Oh by the way I did finish my Jerry Bruckheimer project this morning. It took me about a half hour to come up with a way to work around my lack of knowledge of After Effects and implement a solution. I have a lot of fun with these things. Since I don't know the "easy" way to do something I get to engineer my own way to fake it

Thanks cheesestringer,
I do compress my files of course once I'm completely finished with the project. What I was talking about in previous posts is that I like to work with the uncompressed video all the way through to the end, so that as I hop between programs it's not getting compressed (and degraded) over and over again.

For example I render out an uncompressed .avi in Blender that might be 3-5 GB. Then maybe I have to import it into After Effects to do some touchups. After Effects saves a new .avi when I'm done (still uncompressed) and maybe I load that into Premiere to add audio or do something else. Premiere also outputs an uncompressed .avi, which I load into Virtual Dub to add fade in and fade out effects, and sometimes deinterlace the footage (if the source was a ripped .vob, not if it's Blender). Virtual dub also saves an uncompressed .avi which is ready for compression.

I've never used all of the tools above for one project so that was completely fabricated, but I do often use 3 of the 4, so there are lots of places I'm choosing not to recompress the video to save quality.

At the end I use a neat free program called SUPER to do the compression, choosing H.264 video (4032kbps), .mp3 audio (160kbps), and an .avi container, and my file sizes wind up ~10MB. SUPER is cool because it can render to just about any container with just about any codec and is hugely customizable. Movie Maker would work fine too at this stage, but last I knew it only encodes to .wma and I like having options

PS: Before anyone comments about "Why do you do this in Premiere when After Effects can do it" or "Why use Virtual Dub just for that, make Premiere do it" I'll repeat that I don't actually know how to use these tools. Well, OK, I know how to use Blender well enough as long as nothing has to be animated/deformed, and a chimpanzee could use Virtual Dub, but I'm talking about the Adobe tools. I've never really worked with them until just a week or so ago and I'm still at the stage of faking my way through with trial and error. Once something works I tend to do it that same way every time.

jrl, I haven't looked at the curtain project in a long time I do remember the behavior that you're talking about.

If I'm not mistaken, it's because the curtains are a soft body simulation. With fluids and soft bodies if you want to preview the simulation you have to step through 1 frame at a time and let it recalculate. Stepping through 10 frames or moving backwards doesn't work. Even though the preview doesn't work as you'd expect they will still render fine when you render the project based on how the simulation is set up. ie: maybe it is set to start simulating the curtains at frame 1 in the project render or 20, or 100, etc.

When you're happy with how a simulation looks, but before you render the project, you usually want to "Bake" it. This calculates all of the simulation's frames so that it doesn't have to get done at render time. I think it also gets rid of the funny behavior of the preview that you're talking about because after baking it won't have to recalculate the simulation every time you jump frames.

That's probably a barely understandable explanation of what's going on, but what can I say, I barely understand this stuff

Well it's been quiet around here so I thought I'd share a little bit about what I've been working on for the last few days. I'm doing a custom intro 100% in After Effects based on a bunch of tutorials over at www.videocopilot.net. Much thanks goes to Andrew Kramer of the aforementioned site for sharing these amazing tutorials, and Eubank for turning me on to the place. I did my first test render of the complete ~25 second sequence this evening and minus a few glitches to be worked on it's coming together well. There's no audio in the AE project, but I'm planning on muxing that in later.

So basically, it starts out looking like a Universal intro. The earth spins in space starting over Africa and over 6 seconds we cross the Atlantic until Florida is pretty much centered. I'm thinking about adding the opening portion of the Universal audio so that people will be expecting the text to come swinging around "any second now" . This portion was based on a tutorial here: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/the_blue_planet/.
Coincidentally, the Earth map texture used in that tutorial is the same one we all got from Peerless Productions "way back when" to start the Universal intro. I'm thinking the Levy brothers have spent some time at Videocopilot

At this point there's a glitchy "twitch" in the footage (and the audio, when I add that later) and suddenly the camera starts falling into the earth, specifically right towards Florida. The ground is zooming up towards us with the camera shaking from turbulence in the atmosphere. We break through two layers of clouds and what's that coming into view but my neighborhood, and my house! The camera's rotation levels out and the shaking subsides as we glide gently down to ground level. Again, all of this based on a tutorial here (though I should mention the tutorial runs in reverse, zooming from a house to outer space): http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/

At this point, a liquidy transition starts at the outside of the screen and bleeds it's way towards the center, such that the last thing covered up is my house. It's not a bleed to black though, rather a bleed to a nice textured background. Just as the house disappears an off-angle title plate fades into view and rotates to be square with the camera. The plates says "Herndon Theaters" of course, and neat viney designs "grow" out from it while particles start flying out from behind it. As before, all of this based on a tutorial here: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial...y_title_plate/. At this point I'm thinking of closing with the final bits of the Universal audio to allude back to how the whole video started.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in working outside of Blender check out Videocopilot.net. There are over 70 tutorials that Andrew has posted for free and they are extremely informative. With a little creativity and some trial and error I've strung three of his short tutorials into a full custom theater intro, and learned a ton about After Effects in the process. I've attached some screenshots (there will be 6 total) to show the flavor of the intro, but if you really want to see the components in motion go watch the free tutorials!

The first 3 shots show the Earth view from space, a view of Florida mid-fall as we're passing through the first cloud bank, and a view as we level out and start gliding towards my neighborhood. In the 2nd shot the splotch in the lower left is Lake Okeechobee if you're trying to get your bearings. I realize the clouds don't look too great over the water, but you only see them for a few frames so in motion it's not noticeable. In the third shot that's not a runway on the left hand side, it's actually Interstate 95.

And now the second set of screenshots. These three show the bleeding transition, the title in mid rotation before it has developed much, and the "fully grown" title with flying particles.

In the first shot my house is dead center, in the middle of the 3 on the inside of the bend. Now you know where to aim the missiles.

Again this was all done 100% in After Effects and about 90% of the work was a direct lift from the 3 Videocopilot tutorials in the first post. The other 10% took some creativity and improvising but if I can do it anyone can. After I get a final version rendered I'll do some fade in/fade out in Virtual Dub and mux in some audio but other than that it's AE all the way.

I should probably disclaim that I'm in no way affiliated with Andrew Kramer or Videocopilot.net, but Eubank turned me on to them and now I'm hooked

sa91899 I know what you mean about the long renders. FOX in 1080p was brutal. Even just working in AE is frustrating because of how it jumps and stutters trying to calculate each frame when I move my time position around.

I noticed there's an FAQ on the Videocopilot site and one of the questions is what kind of computer does he record the tutorials on (because of course they're nice and smooth). The answer was a dual quad core Xeon machine (total 8 cores) with only 4 GB RAM. Obviously this stuff is CPU limited in the worst way! If only there was something like CUDA for Adobe and Blender so that they could take advantage of my space heater 8800GTX

I've been thinking about upgrading my processor from the e4300 (dual @ 1.8) to a Q6600 (quad @ 2.4). If everything scaled linearly (I know it won't...) that chip should be ~3.33x more powerful than mine. Not bad for ~$180. With that and my graphics card I should be able to hold out until there's a whole crazy new generation of stuff out there, I just don't know what I'd do with my leftover processor. My fiance could use an upgrade from her old P4, but that means new mobo, new RAM, new everything

Welcome back Eubank and thanks again for pointing me in the right direction with Videocopilot. I still don't know jack about any of this Adobe software, but slowly I'm beginning to learn a trick or two here and there. The custom intro that I'm working on coincidentally came about because I tried making a new Universal intro in AE. I couldn't figure out how to bend text so instead I went this whole new direction

sa91899, I forgot to ask how the Disney logo was coming along. I know you're working the Terminator project now and I know what it's like to have projects go hot and cold (*cough* Pixar) but I was really looking forward to some pointers on how to render a Disney logo of my own.

I'm also planning on re-doing a Lionsgate intro from scratch now that I know a little bit about how AE works. Somehow I managed to break your project file but fortunately I got a good render out of it first . I stumbled across a .m2ts version of the Lionsgate intro in 1080p so I'm going to see what I can fudge together on my own. It may not come out nearly as good as yours, but it should be a learning experience, and if it works it will be HD w/ 5.1 sound instead of SD & stereo.

This is off topic but I thought I'd post that I took the plunge and bought a Q6600 this afternoon along with a new HSF. Hopefully I won't be disappointed with the rendering and editing benefits over my e4300. When I really needed juice for an overight render I would OC the e4300 from 1.8GHz to 2.4 or 2.7GHz so I want to be able to go over 3.0GHz on the quad to really reap some benefit.

It runs at 266x9 stock but I'm thinking that 400x8 (3.2 GHz!) would be a very reasonable jump for when I need the hardcore rendering power. Who knows if the new HSF lives up to expectations I may even leave it over 3GHz full-time. I will of course post more test results and render times once I get it installed and time to play with it.

Well I've been tinkering in AE with making my own 1080p Lionsgate intro from a Blu-ray source as I mentioned before. It's too bad AE won't take a .m2ts source file. I had to convert it to 1000 different things before I found something that AE would accept as a video file and my poor dual core machine could handle working with in AE.

Unlike sa91899 I don't understand how to make/use mattes or even what they do really, so I've been using masks instead and animating their shape to show/hide whatever it is I need. So far it's been remarkably easy. I just overlayed my own doctored background on top of the video and used a combination of 2 masks to properly cover the LIONSGATE text.

I really like this method because I was able to retain the moving clouds in the background just like sa91899 did with his matted intro. For some reason I wasn't able to do that properly using his template (probably user error ) so I'm excited.

At the end it gets tricky because the scene is fading out to black and the doctored background is not, but I've been playing with animating the lightness and saturation of the background to compensate. I may have to experiment with yet another mask, and/or maybe an adjustment layer to really get the fade correct. It looks alright so far but you'll be able to see it's not perfect.

I think right now I've gotten everything to where it's ready for adding custom text. I'm going to fire up Blender, spit out some text, and see if I can't put together a rough video. For now, I'll go ahead and upload a preview of where I'm at. This is reencoded to H.264(528kbps)/mp3(52kbps) and 400x225 res, because I had to squeeze it under the 500k attachment limit.