Author Topic: Animation export and editing advice  (Read 1583 times)

2020-08-12, 12:26:33

Kalya

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Hoping people can offer some advice on this. I'm increasingly asked for flythroughs along side the still work. I have done this in the past saving out 8bit tiff sequences and putting them together with a bit of colour correction in AE - just getting a monthly subscription when I need it.

I was wondering if this was the best way for simple flythroughs? Even just flat 8bit images at 25 fps mount up to a considerable size so im not sure how people stretch to 16 or 32bit multilayered files. Must be a nightmare? Also can anyone recommend a simple but powerful editor that can add good quality text and also encode a high quality output? Whilst I can use AE I feel it can be a bit overkill but I like the colour controls.

Do people set number of passes or noise amount as there time control per frame? I also prefer the fixed noise which I know is perhaps not what most people chose. I find it less distracting over that dancing noise on under sampled frames. I was thinking maybe a denoise of 0.5 on a 1080p frame might be about right. Does anyone have any experience of testing the various levels and finding a sweet spot here? In the end does final compression make the denoising worse as you are losing even more detail or is it in a way better as it saves time and that extra detail we might get through less denoising and longer frame time is washed away with compression of the final clip anyway?

Thanks for any help on this.

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« Last Edit: 2020-08-12, 14:17:54 by romullus »

2020-08-12, 13:38:32
Reply #1

TomG

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- Drives measured in Terabytes are a must these days :)

- Still overkill, but Davinci Resolve is free, so at least it removes the monthly subscription part

- Noise is usually recommended for animations, since things may change a lot from frame to frame so going for time or passes may not give consistent quality.

- Denoising of 0.5 to 0.7 is generally the sweet spot, if the noise level target is somewhere like 3 to 5%. You can aim for a lower noise target and reduce the amount of denoising if needed (but renders will take longer). This is the Corona HQ Denoiser, the AI denoisers may blur things a bit more, or be more prone to giving different results for different frames.

Hope those help!
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2020-08-13, 00:37:34
Reply #2

Njen

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You can generally get away with a higher noise level limit when rendering animation. For the short film I am making (trailer below), I have settled on 8% with the default level of denoising. In motion you can hardly tell the difference if the noise level limit was 8% or 3%. Plus if you still have some fireflies left over, some post denoising in your comp program always works too.

As for files, I use 16it exr's, with all AOV's set as individual files, NOT multi-channel exr's. As sometimes I use the AOV's, but sometimes I don't, so I have the option of having my comp render faster by simply using the beauty pass.

My film is about 10,500 frames, averaging 3 - 4 render layers per shot, which average around 25 AOV's per render layer = lot's of data. When I finish it later this year, I will be able to provide a deep dive on all of the metrics.


2020-08-14, 14:02:12
Reply #3

sebastian___

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I was wondering if this was the best way for simple flythroughs? Even just flat 8bit images at 25 fps mount up to a considerable size so im not sure how people stretch to 16 or 32bit multilayered files. Must be a nightmare?

Don't forget to activate compression when you are saving to sequence files.

 - png - probably one of the smallest file sizes and has compression on by default, but slower to play, but that speed loss might be negligible depending on the computer, image content and resolution

 - tiff has multiple types of compression. Packbits should be faster while LZW and ZIP should have a smaller file size but slower to play. Tiff has even a jpeg compression, but that is probably lossy while the previous mentioned ones are without any loss in quality.

 - for 8 bit - targa or tga can also be an option, in my tests its RLE compression is the fastest to decode/play because it's not a zip like compression and takes better advantage of repeating colors in the image. And if you are compositing and save only a small smoke element in a big image and have the rest of the image black, file size can be super small like 100 KB for a full hd res.

 - exr - can also have the RLE compression, which I'm guessing it's fast like in tga, and also has zip which I guess it's slower but makes smaller file sizes.