Planet Blender

The Producer's Report #125 - The Path to Picture Lock
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-09-18 23:00:00

Ian, Nate and I met this morning to review the input we collected from the v.14 test screening. It was a great discussion and we made a lot of decisions about what we want to do to achieve picture lock. Some of the ideas that people suggested were amazing and we're looking at how we might implement a few of them. But, have no fear, we are moving with all speed to wrap things up and get to picture lock ASAP! Ian is leading the charge, so if he contacts you, please help him any way you can. Thank you!

Two additional things we need help with are:

1. We need an Adobe Creative Suite (CS3), Production Premium (Windows) expert to help us understand a certain issue we are encountering when we render out AVI files. Currently, if we play the Premiere timeline, or send it to Encore to burn a Blu-ray, it plays fine. But if we render out an AVI file, we find that there is a half frame of an unrelated interlace image appearing on screen between shots. It's weird. Do you know anybody who could help us figure out why this is happening?
2. We are now looking for a colorist to help us with the color grading of the movie. We have tools to aid in this process, the Magic Bullet suite of color tools and the Black Magic Ultrascope (see image above). Would you be interested in earning a credit in Project London as the colorist? Please contact me directly to discuss, by sending me an email at phil@projectlondonmovie.com.

That's the news.

Cheers,

Phil McCoy, Executive Producer
on behalf of Nathan McCoy (left), also Executive Producer and Phil McCoy (right)

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Two Simple But Helpful Changes in Blender 2.5
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2010-09-18 22:34:00

Here are two helpful changes the Blender developers have made to Blender 2.5.

We can now remove presets for the Render Dimensions:


And, we can remove Cloth presets:



Also, the "File Exists" popup (you know the one that was easy to miss?) is no longer a part of the workflow. When saving a new file, if the typed filename matches an existing file in the same folder the filename field is tinted red. The tooltip for the field informs you of the meaning of the red tinting. If you save under these conditions, the existing file is simply overwritten.


Since I'm keeping a close watch for these types of changes, I'll be sure to do a quick post to let you know when interesting things develop.


Bye!

授業(BlogPet)
CG系blog - 2010-09-18 22:18:07

きょう輪ゴムは、FDTKは課題みたいな授業した。

*このエントリは、ブログペットの「輪ゴム」が書きました。

Twitter: 2010-09-19
Matt Ebb - 2010-09-18 18:31:00

• Quickly added motion blurred RiPoints export for particles, deadline tomorrow… #
• each shot i render with gorgeous reyes motion blur/dof/aa makes it more and more difficult to ever go back to anything less. #
• Visited http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org gallery in Chippendale on the weekend – very impressive collection/space/design #
• RT @rebeccawatson: Apparently moving to London only increased my hipsterness. http://bit.ly/dyz7j8 // surry hills anyone? #

Eyecandy, an VTOL
Materia - The Awakening - 2010-09-18 18:24:54

Okay, quite many days have passed, and not much has happened, until i today decided to finally get my act together and do some real work. So not long (well quite many hours actually) after i managed to whip up this following 3D model. It is used as prop in atleast one of the scenes of the film.

Enjoy, and do remember that we are looking for someone to finish a character models for us…

Encoding Issues – a call for help.
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-09-18 11:19:08

Hey all, Beorn here, the animator dude who’s been roped into the thankless task of encoding the movie into various formats. (Actually I was crazy enough to volunteer!)
Fortunately the DivX files will be encoded by the good people at DivX, who are actual professionals (as opposed to a forum trawling script kiddie like me).
Despite what Ton has said on this blog before, this is not my area of expertise. I’m really learning as I go and would very much appreciate any advice from the community. I just thought I’d share my current progress and ask for any suggestions on how to improve things.

The goal:
To provide h264 quicktimes and ogg video files in 480p, 720p and 1080p, with subtitles and surround sound (except the 480p versions which will be stereo), and to encode the video for the dvds (NTSC and PAL versions).

I’ve been supplied:

• directory of PNG files, 2048×872 in size
• a stereo wav file
• an audio only quicktime file with 5.1 sound in the aac codec. (there is also an ac3 file for the dvd)
• a directory of subtitle files in .srt format

Please note: I’ve compiled my own versions of ffmpeg and x264 in order to make the quicktimes.

My current issues:

• I haven’t been able to add 5.1 audio to the ogg files in any other codec than flac, which means the files are HUGE.
• The ogg video files are about 3x bigger than the quicktimes, even with stereo sound
• I haven’t been able to add subtitles to the quicktimes.
• I’m using mplayer to do the scaling/cropping/letterboxing, but it keeps crashing on the 1080 versions when trying to crop on the fly. Notice the hack I’ve included on those versions; making cropped copies of the PNGs, encoding them and deleting them. It works, but it’s… inelegant.

Here are the shell scripts…

Ogg versions:
title="Sintel"
author="Durian Open Movie Team"
year="2010"
license="Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license"
copyright="(c) Copyright 2010 Blender Foundation, all rights reserved"
description="Sintel open movie project"
au_stereo="input/audio/sintel-master-st.wav"
au_surround="input/audio/sintel-master-51.mov"

echo "********************"
echo "Ogging the audio"
echo "********************"
ffmpeg -i $au_stereo -acodec libvorbis -ab 448k -ac 2 output/ogg/tmp-audio-st.ogg
ffmpeg -i $au_surround -acodec flac -ac 6 -ab 128k output/ogg/tmp-audio-51.ogg

echo "********************"
echo "Ogging the subtitles"
echo "********************"
kateenc -t srt -l en -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_en.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_en.srt
kateenc -t srt -l de -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_de.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_de.srt
kateenc -t srt -l es -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_es.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_es.srt
kateenc -t srt -l fr -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_fr.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_fr.srt
kateenc -t srt -l nl -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_nl.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_nl.srt
kateenc -t srt -l pl -c SUB -o output/ogg/tmp-subs_pl.ogg input/subtitles/sintel_pl.srt


echo "********************"
echo "Starting 480 ogg"
echo "********************"
rm output/ogg/stream.yuv
mkfifo output/ogg/stream.yuv &&
mplayer mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=854:480 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=output/ogg/stream.yuv&
ffmpeg2theora --keyint 24 --framerate 24 -v 8 output/ogg/stream.yuv --title "$title" --artist "$author" --copyright "$copyright" --license "$license" -o output/ogg/tmp-480.ogv
oggz-merge output/ogg/tmp-480.ogv output/ogg/tmp-audio-st.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_en.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_de.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_es.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_fr.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_nl.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_pl.ogg -o output/ogg/sintel-480p.ogv
rm output/ogg/stream.yuv

echo "********************"
echo "Starting 720 ogg"
echo "********************"
rm output/ogg/stream.yuv
mkfifo output/ogg/stream.yuv &&
mplayer mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=1280:720 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=output/ogg/stream.yuv&
ffmpeg2theora --keyint 24 --framerate 24 -v 8 output/ogg/stream.yuv --title "$title" --artist "$author" --copyright "$copyright" --license "$license" -o output/ogg/tmp-720.ogv
oggz-merge output/ogg/tmp-720.ogv output/ogg/tmp-audio-st.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_en.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_de.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_es.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_fr.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_nl.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_pl.ogg -o output/ogg/sintel-720p.ogv
rm output/ogg/stream.yuv

echo "********************"
echo "Starting 1080 ogg"
echo "********************"
cd tmp
mplayer mf://../input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1080,crop=1920:1080 -vo png:z=3
cd ..
ffmpeg2theora --keyint 24 --framerate 24 -v 8 tmp/%08d.png --title "$title" --artist "$author" --copyright "$copyright" --license "$license" -o output/ogg/tmp-1080.ogv
oggz-merge output/ogg/tmp-1080.ogv output/ogg/tmp-audio-51.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_en.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_de.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_es.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_fr.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_nl.ogg output/ogg/tmp-subs_pl.ogg -o output/ogg/sintel-1080p.ogv

rm tmp/*.png
rm output/ogg/tmp*.*
echo "Ogg versions encoded"

H264/AAC Quicktimes:

title="Sintel"
author="Durian Open Movie Team"
year="2010"
copyright="(c) Copyright 2010 Blender Foundation, all rights reserved"
license="Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license"
description="Sintel open movie project"
au_stereo="input/audio/sintel-master-st.wav"
au_surround="input/audio/sintel-master-51.mov"


echo "********************"
echo "Starting 480 quicktime"
echo "********************"
rm output/h264/stream.yuv
mkfifo output/h264/stream.yuv &&
mplayer mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=854:480 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=output/h264/stream.yuv&
ffmpeg -y -f yuv4mpegpipe -i output/h264/stream.yuv -i $au_stereo -acodec libfaac -ab 448k -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -crf 22 -threads 8 -metadata title="$title" -metadata author="$author" -metadata year="$year" -metadata copyright="$copyright" -metadata license="$license" -metadata description="$description" output/h264/sintel-480p.mov
rm output/h264/stream.yuv

echo "********************"
echo "Starting 720 quicktime"
echo "********************"
rm output/h264/stream.yuv
mkfifo output/h264/stream.yuv &&
mplayer mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=1280:720 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=output/h264/stream.yuv&
ffmpeg -y -f yuv4mpegpipe -i output/h264/stream.yuv -i $au_surround -acodec copy -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -crf 22 -threads 8 -metadata title="$title" -metadata author="$author" -metadata year="$year" -metadata copyright="$copyright" -metadata license="$license" -metadata description="$description" output/h264/sintel-720p.mov
rm output/h264/stream.yuv

echo "********************"
echo "Starting 1080 quicktime"
echo "********************"
cd tmp
mplayer mf://../input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1080,crop=1920:1080 -vo png:z=3
cd ..
ffmpeg -y -r 24 -i tmp/%08d.png -i $au_surround -acodec copy -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -crf 22 -threads 8 -metadata title="$title" -metadata author="$author" -metadata year="$year" -metadata copyright="$copyright" -metadata license="$license" -metadata description="$description" output/h264/sintel-1080p.mov
rm tmp/*.png
echo "Quicktimes encoded"

DVD versions:

# NTSC version
mencoder mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=720:480 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -ss 0 -endpos 883 -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:aspect=16/9:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=4400:keyint=15:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -srate 48000 -ofps 30000/1001 -of mpeg -mc 0 -noskip -o "output/dvd/sintel-ntsc_noaudio.mp2"
echo "NTSC-DVD files encoded"

# PAL version
mencoder mf://input/png/*.png -mf w=2048:h=872:fps=24:type=png -sws 9 -vf expand=2048:1152,scale=720:576 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -ss 0 -endpos 883 -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:aspect=16/9:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=4400:keyint=15:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -srate 48000 -ofps 25/1 -of mpeg -mc 0 -noskip -o "output/dvd/sintel-pal_noaudio.mpeg2"
echo "PAL-DVD files encoded"

Please try to limit comments to those that are actually useful to this process.
Also, please do not ask us to send you the files to encode yourself. After the premiere, all can be released.

Cheers,
Beorn

Creating a Stylized Dragon – Complete Series
BlenderNation - 2010-09-18 06:53:50

David Ward’s Creating a Stylized Dragon using Blender 2.5 series is now complete. From the tutorial: In this multi-part series, I’ll be covering how to box-model a stylized dragon, making heavy...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Stupidity
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-09-18 05:42:00