Previous Work Re-rendered in HD
I never intended on revisited any of my school work, but since Vimeo's HD service is so good I was strongly compelled to re-render my motion design work in 720p. It also helped that I have a trial version of After Effects installed, so this will be the only chance I'll have to do this for a while, now that I'm away from school and don't have access to the Mac Lab.
So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD.
Wonder
This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing, I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a different rotation for a second and then go back again, and a couple of petals in the background would pop into existence while in-frame (I used a particle system to create the petals, and the petal's birth was supposed to happen off-frame so you couldn't see it happen).
I fixed both of those issues and had it render for another day, but now it's done and it looks awesome.
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
Sneakers
I made this one in the Mac Lab, so naturally all of the fonts were broken. Fixing that was tedious because of the crazy text animation I did. There was also a few problems in the animation that I fixed as well (at that smaller resolution I never noticed that the last S in the Sneakers title drifted down). Anyway, it's done and available for your viewing pleasure.
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
One thing I will add that is really nice about Vimeo's service is that you can replace the videos with newer ones, so I didn't have to re-link anything on my blog even going from web quality to HD.
Bad Robot
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
Now this video was HD to begin with; I was planning on having all of my projects rendered in HD. However, this video was also the reason why the rest for that class were 1024x576. First off, QuickTime is stupid. If you open a video file that's larger than the screen size it doesn't scale it to fit until you press Command-3 (and there's no full-screen mode unless you "go Pro" for $30). I was surprised that no one besides myself knew about that shortcut, even my Mac-using instructors. He didn't like having a video larger than the screen and later asked the class to send him all videos in 320x240 for concerns about frame and file size (some students used a raw codec to save the files). I of course rebelled, and made the videos just big enough to fit on screen, and encoded it properly so the file size was reasonable. There weren't any complaints though.
Anyway, I revisited Bad Robot just so I could get a clean rendering of the video and in a format that I like. I've been using Blender a lot to encode videos because it has good ffmpeg support (in Windows anyway). Since revisiting these projects I've now used Blender to encode all of the files that I uploaded to Vimeo so far (except for the Touch the Table video, but that's not motion design).
I really like Vimeo. I just can't wait until embed videos, like what I have on my blog, can be viewed in HD instead of following the link to view it on their site.
So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD.
Wonder
This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing, I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a different rotation for a second and then go back again, and a couple of petals in the background would pop into existence while in-frame (I used a particle system to create the petals, and the petal's birth was supposed to happen off-frame so you couldn't see it happen).
I fixed both of those issues and had it render for another day, but now it's done and it looks awesome.
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
Sneakers
I made this one in the Mac Lab, so naturally all of the fonts were broken. Fixing that was tedious because of the crazy text animation I did. There was also a few problems in the animation that I fixed as well (at that smaller resolution I never noticed that the last S in the Sneakers title drifted down). Anyway, it's done and available for your viewing pleasure.
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
One thing I will add that is really nice about Vimeo's service is that you can replace the videos with newer ones, so I didn't have to re-link anything on my blog even going from web quality to HD.
Bad Robot
>> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)
Now this video was HD to begin with; I was planning on having all of my projects rendered in HD. However, this video was also the reason why the rest for that class were 1024x576. First off, QuickTime is stupid. If you open a video file that's larger than the screen size it doesn't scale it to fit until you press Command-3 (and there's no full-screen mode unless you "go Pro" for $30). I was surprised that no one besides myself knew about that shortcut, even my Mac-using instructors. He didn't like having a video larger than the screen and later asked the class to send him all videos in 320x240 for concerns about frame and file size (some students used a raw codec to save the files). I of course rebelled, and made the videos just big enough to fit on screen, and encoded it properly so the file size was reasonable. There weren't any complaints though.
Anyway, I revisited Bad Robot just so I could get a clean rendering of the video and in a format that I like. I've been using Blender a lot to encode videos because it has good ffmpeg support (in Windows anyway). Since revisiting these projects I've now used Blender to encode all of the files that I uploaded to Vimeo so far (except for the Touch the Table video, but that's not motion design).
I really like Vimeo. I just can't wait until embed videos, like what I have on my blog, can be viewed in HD instead of following the link to view it on their site.
Comments