Many things exist still in this that I want to change and make better. Unfortunately time is running out, and my efforts are now being directed towards Dream 2. If the embedded playback of the video above doesn’t work, you can try downloading the source video, and playing it back with Quicktime or VLC, etc. It is just a standard baseline mpeg4-avc video file.
So there it is, the ending of scene 1. With 2 weeks go to finish the entire project, I have finally sortof completed a somewhat mediocre version of the first 3rd of what I was envisioning (it’s not really done! it still needs even more tweaking! hard to believe isn’t it… I guess the process of this type of animation is just endless tweaking until the author can stand to look at it)…
Now, one of two things will happen. Either a), I focus on this and nothing but this for the rest of the quarter and make a ridiculous amount of pogress, or b), this project ends up being significantly less epic than I had intended. I intend to try my best to make option a) happen, although there will likely be some compromise into b) territory.
This project still needs a name. I’ve got a couple in mind, but I don’t think “yet another project that Jed tried to get done on time and failed” will work very well.
2 CommentsI happened across the 2007 Adobe Design Achievement Award Winners page today, and enjoyed watching some quite amazing works of animation and other design arts by students and folks not older than myself. Being in my position and seeing things like that makes you think. There are a multitude of people out in there in the big wide world who are orders of magnitude more dedicated, focused, and hardworking than yourself, and who for those or other reasons are able to create work that is seemingly incomprehensibly better than anything you yourself are capable of creating. I suppose that is a good starting point, and certainly better than living in a state of ignorant denial about how great your work is.
Not everyone can be a genius, because then no one would.
Regarding my previous post, which is by far the most “rant-ish” and emotionally charged post on this blog so far, it turns out that brutalizing Maya into doing your bidding is a challenging and time-intensive occupation. Sortof like this graph:
See that cube with the checkerboard texture on it? See that whale looking thing with just a lambert shader on it?
Too bad I spent 4 hours learning how to model in Maya and then modeling that shape which was going to be the walls of the white room in scene 01 shot 3 etc. Too bad Maya has decided that it is impossible for that object to have any type of texturing applied to it, whether or not it is converted between polygon/nurbs/subdiv surface object type, regardless of whether or not it is exported and reimported, regardless of the type of textures or shaders used.
I am seriously reconsidering my choice to use Maya for this project, simply because it is the established standard of 3D modeling and animation software. There are numerous other brilliant alternatives, that make Maya’s interface and usability look like it was designed in 1983, and that don’t crash every 15 minutes because you looked at it funny, and that don’t hide every possible essential function behind 10 layers of context menus that are near impossible to remember until you use the software for 2 years, and that don’t structure the interface in the most unintuitive, difficult to use, inefficient, and unecessarily complex way possible.
Granted, this problem with an object not wanting to be textured is probably something with a “simple” solution, but in that very aspect lies the problem. If something like this problem has a simple solution, it should be readily available and easy for the user to figure out through the design of the interface, or at the worst, by looking in the manual. Maya’s documentation is some of the most unwieldy, rambling, and chaotic software documentations I have seen. While given the program’s complexity, this might seem forgivable, but seriously, it is 2008. My software should do things for me, and have the capability of doing more advanced things in a readily accessible and transparent fashion; it should not have all of the advanced things vomited all over the place in the most confusing and haphazard possible way, with all ease of use features hidden behind large barriers of prior necessary knowledge. I could go on, but I’m not going to, because I have to figure out how to get my model into Cinema4D 10.5. Wait, no I can’t do that because Maya corrupted the most recent iteration of my project file because it crashed catastrophically. Awesome. Time to start over from 4 hours ago.
=edit, 2008-03-07= There is a good discussion of Maya interface refinements and suggestions, at Thomas Mann’s webpage.
Here lies a draft of what I have been working on. It is a very rough version of the first scene, with cursory sound design. The final portion of it, the white room section, is extremely rough, and would probably be better termed an animatic than a draft. The 3D camera movements are jerky and nearly unnacceptable. The room was built in After Effects as a last resort on Tuesday, because I was running out of time, and was having a great deal of difficulty getting it built in Maya. I will probably redo the entire scene in Maya in order to make it look more like I want it to, and then do a better job on the compositing of the arms. In this draft the arms appear to have some sort of field-inversion error, causing jerky movement, which I also need to fix.
Hopefully another update will follow soon, with work that is more polished.
Recently I was doing an activity that I have previously found myself doing on multiple occasions: Looking through all of the different codecs that are options to render out my newly perfected 1080p23.976 scene into. I could choose the apple Animation codec, which is rumoured to be nearly lossless, at the expense of harddrive space and at the cost of being unable to play it back in real-time, but to the benefit of having a lossless image. A similar predicament with the 8-bit 4:2:2 Lossless codec. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the temptation of encoding to something like mjpeg, and having a small file, easy playback, but horrendous image degredation.
Apple and Red Cinema have been hyping the new Apple ProRes 4:2:2 codec for a while. “Perhaps I should use that!’ I thought. “If this codec can compress 4k video from the Red camera down to 200mbits/sec, then surely it could help me with my mere 1080p workflow problems!” And so then I decided to do some research about just what technology the ProRes 422 codec used and how it compared to others of similar variety.
During that process, I came across this comparison of the ProRes 422 codec and the Avid DNxHD codec, which is apparently one with a similar intended specialty of “Why yes! I can compress your HD footage so you can actually work with it, while preserving detail!” Apparently, the ProRes 422 codec is a bit more lossy at similar bitrates than Avid’s codec. After a little bit of searching, I discovered that not only are Avid’s codecs freely available, they are cross-platform between Windows and OSX. This issue was lending me trepidation earlier on as well, myself considering what would happen if I had a bunch of scenes rendered out in Apple ProRes 422, and then needed to reboot into Windows to do some specialized work on something, only to be unable to read my files!
Anyway, barring complete disaster, I will be using the Avid codecs for some of my needs.
Here are rough storyboards for my project. If the nature of my project is unknown to you, I posted a Visual Treatment earlier.
These storyboards represent a keyframed point-to-point abstracted version of the visual contents of my project. A lot of detail is missing, such as specific transitions and even in-between points of some shots. I am still not sure about the visual treatment that I am approaching this project with. As touched upon in a reply to a comment left by my Mother, I am somewhat torn between the idea of representing the dreams as faithfully as I can recollect them, and the idea of altering the dreams to provide a coherent or more easily digestible presentation for the viewer.
Some examples : I was having a very difficult time while storyboarding the 3rd dream. There is such an emotional and personal experience element to this dream that is difficult if not impossible to convey when using the convention of 1st person perspective shots that I have decided to use in order to try and accurately represent the visual experience of the dream. A purely audiovisual format is a much much lower resolution type of medium than a real experience of dream or of reality, in the sense that much less can be communicated and be transparent to feeling. I think that I need some way of bolstering that missing information of emotional poignancy, so that it is still present in the work. The challenge is how to do this without completely altering the form of the dream as it was originally experienced. I am unsure of what to do, and am considering whether it is more important to convey the original visual experience of the dream as accurately as possible, or to depart slightly from the original visual experience and in doing so be enabled to better convey the emotional aspect of the dream as it was originally experienced.
At any rate, I thoroughly consider these storyboards to be a starting point, and a place to create changes and build from. A definitely and incrementally defined structure of how this project will come to be, they are not. Nor could they be with my obviously lacking drawing ability which, though getting slightly better, is still sorely in need of bettering. I feel like this is a valuable first step in starting to create the images themselves though, and will work to my benefit in not getting lost in the process of production.
In a previous post, I briefly discussed some of the specific concerns of working with footage from the Canon HV20. In this post, I will talk about these things in a little more depth, and with some example pictures to more fully demonstrate what I’m talking about.
Here is a full resolution frame-capture of a video stream shot with the HV20 (the image is a link to the full resolution image). All of the images posted here are compressed with jpeg 80% quality, and should have most of their original attributes preserved. Note that the pulldown has been removed with After Effects, and that this was originally a frame comprised of two interlaced fields. Note that this picture is HUGE (1920×1080), so if you have a regular sized monitor, expect to scroll around to look at it completely.
If you look closely at the image, you can discern fragments of interlacing artifacts left behind from the pulldown removal. This happens because the mpeg2 compression of the interlaced image results in fields that are imperfect with macroblocks and other imperfections. This confuses After Effects’ algorithms, leaving behind chunks of image that still have interlaced areas. Effectively this just looks like bits of the image have weird blocks of ‘liney’ areas. Below is a 4:1 crop of the above original frame, doubled in size.
You can notice these artifacts on the edge of the finger. In After Effects, there are plugins to process a frame to remove interlacing artifacts. With one of those applied, the image looks a little cleaner.
There are still noticeable artifacts from the mpeg2 compression. You can make out macroblocking and chroma abnormalities on the thumb and surrounding areas. If you were to look at the individual color channels, this would be more noticeable. Usually the compression artifacts are worse in the blue channel. There is a plugin that comes with the Magic Bullet Suite called the “Deartifactor” that takes a whack at removing compression artifacts such at as these.
Deartifacted:
Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:
Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:
Sometimes it is hard to see what the deartifactor is doing in areas of detail. Here is another comparison in another less detailed area of the image.
Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:
Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:
There is also a filter in After Effects called Remove Grain that was once sold as Grain Surgery by Visual Infinity, but is now included for free with After Effects. This plugin is quite amazingly good at removing grain while preserving detail in the image. While the compression artifacting is not quite grain, it does do a fair amount to improve the apparent image clarity, and while it does soften the image some, it can be adjusted for good results.
Remove Grain filter applied:
Here is the final processed image, in full resolution.
Most likely the effective qualitative differences in the image when viewed full-resolution are relatively minor. However, when you get into things like doing dramatic color correction or other processing, or attempting to extract a matte from an image using color keying, it is absolutely essential to have the best quality image that you can to work with. Of course it is not really a great idea to try to use HDV for something requiring excellent chroma key matte extraction, but for 800 dollars, this camera produces some amazing images, and you would be hard pressed to find a better solution for less than several thousand. There is also the possibility of capturing 4:2:2 uncompressed video before the MPEG2 compression stage from the HDMI output of this camera, if you have a Black Magic Intensity card, or an equivalent HDMI capture device, which could theoretically be plugged into a laptop. There has been some experimentation in this area, but little noticeable benefit is likely to be achieved.
As free alternatives for the post-processing of HDV, there is a plethora of possibility with AviSynth and various other freeware windows applications. There is quite a bit of activity around the area of using AviSynth for post-processing of HV20 footage.
The Farnsworth plus Sillyman Process
Automated 24p pulldown workflow using DGIndex and VirtualDubMod
Morgan MJPEG2000 as an alternative HD Intermediate Codec
AVISynth and VDub Templates / Code
To end this post, here are some other full-frame image-captures from the HV20, with no processing applied to them other than pulldown removal and deinterlacing.
An indoor image recorded in low light, showing the characteristic of the camera in high-gain mode, which can be avoided if operated properly.
An outdoor image from the camera on a relatively bright day.
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