Animation tests for SW fanfilm

[salm]

nice. i´d let the fighter closest to the camera fly by even closer.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Ah, forgot that first one with the fighters was there, wondered what you were on about for a minute.

You sir are a MIND READER! I already altered the animation and rerendered it a couple of nights ago because it's just too static, no real action. Now the two fighters who are firing stay the same, but the two wingmen spin and peel off at the end, with one of them flashing by the camera extremely closely, filling the frame for a second with it's wing. The Interdictor also gets more roll added to it's move and the YT2000 also get's more movement to make it look like it's really trying to dodge the incoming fire. I'll post it in place of the old one and put up a mail to let you all know, then you can see the difference by clicking on the first link again.

[Durandal]

Hi guys...

The format has been chosen to fit in with the live action filming, which is D1 NTSC 720 x 486 at 29.97 frames a second, I had no choice in that if the film is to edit together properly. It's also to be in DivX, a codec I really like, it's just as a 56k guy myself I know what a pain in the sphincter it is to download animations from the net. I deliberately compressed them far more than usual because I wanted to show the action and the 'look' rather than details, as well as get a 56k friendly size.

I think you've got your resolutions confused. For proper display on a TV screen, the resolution would be 720x480. For proper display on a computer screen, the resolution should be 640x480. When working with TV content on a computer, you use 720x480 because TV's use non-square pixels (each pixel's width:height ratio is 4:3), and your computer uses square pixels (1:1 ratio), so your computer needs to fill in a few more pixels on the sides. However, when capturing from an NTSC source, you capture at 640x480 to view the content properly. Since this is intended for computer viewing, you should use 640x480 for the full resolution render.

However, I'd recommend doing the final render in widescreen aspect ratio (640x272 or 640x352) at 23.976 fps for two reasons.

1. Widescreen will reduce the number of pixels you have in your video, thus decreasing size.
2. 23.976 fps will decrease the number of frames in your video, thus decreasing file size.

There is really no reason for you to use 29.97 fps. That is for NTSC interlacing; you're not doing that. This is for computers, which use progressive frames.

Also, if you plan to make lower-bandwidth version of the movie at lower resolution, you should be sure to keep the height and width dimensions in multiples of 16, whether you use DivX, 3ivx or XviD; they all have macroblock sizes of 16, and you always want to make the video fit nicely into the macroblock size when doing compression. So, while 320x136 might give you the correct aspect ratio for 2.35:1 video, you'll want to use 320x128, since 128 divides evenly by 16.

As for the codec, XviD or 3ivx will both give you demonstrably superior output compared to DivX, especially at the lower bitrates you're looking at.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Hmmm, no, I'm definitely rendering this at NTSC D1 digital video standard because it's not being made for computers, but for American video. I think the guys are using DV cameras for the live stuff and these are the settings they specified, so I can only assume that they know what they're up to since they're a bunch of film students. They can use After Effects to do all sorts of stuff if need be, but all the animations are timed at 30 frames a second. Even if they change the format the timing of the anims would be all wrong.

I'm uploading the improved V38 fighter anim, give it 10 minutes from this post's time and try the link.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenny7/V38testsmall.avi

[Rob Wilson]

Hmmm, no, I'm definitely rendering this at NTSC D1 digital video standard because it's not being made for computers, but for American video. I think the guys are using DV cameras for the live stuff and these are the settings they specified, so I can only assume that they know what they're up to since they're a bunch of film students. They can use After Effects to do all sorts of stuff if need be, but all the animations are timed at 30 frames a second. Even if they change the format the timing of the anims would be all wrong.

I'm uploading the improved V38 fighter anim, give it 10 minutes from this post's time and try the link.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenny7/V38testsmall.avi

Nice touch with the wingmen, I presume they would continue their roll to come up on the underside of the freighter on both sides to prohibit it's evasive manoeuvres.

Very nice.