END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

Here's my new Mandelbulber OpenCl v 1.21 video, "CHAOS BOX" which is a face-melting mandelbox with Julias and powers and limits and trap lights. It's also with original music from me called "Chromatic Jack," which is a collaboration between me and a guitarist friend on the Stickist forum, Scott Kerr, who is a guitar shredder and teacher and studio performer who wrote this song with me.  I play the Chapman Stick Railboard as bass, piano, and the drums, and he plays all the guitars.

The fractal is a simple Mandelbox heavily using limits, and I'm also morphing things almost too quickly here--the Youtube video quality just can't keep up with how quickly features are changing, even at 30 FPS. You can actually download all 3.5 GBs of the original video if you so choose (it's the only way to really see the rapidly changing detail.) Warning if you have epilepsy or issues--there's a lot of flashing color sweeps as well, to be as frenetic and kinetic as possible with the music.

Video is my standard 1920 X 1080, 30 FPS, H264 codec, built from around 7200 JPEGs, using Mandelbulber OpenCL v 1.21, GPU-rendered on 2 MSI GeForce 980s, at about 30 seconds a frame and taking about 2 days.

Here's the Vimeo link:
<a href="https://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=174902263&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=01AAEA" target="_blank">https://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=174902263&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=01AAEA</a>

Youtube:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/ubGV2mPSrfc&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/ubGV2mPSrfc&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

Steve Sink, paigan0

Stephen (Steve) Sink, Paigan Productions
(SoundCloud) http://soundcloud.com/stephen-sink-1
(3D Fractal Music Videos) http://vimeo.com/channels/fractals

Happy to share as much as I can! Thanks for the help!

Also, as you asked about offline, I'm using jpegs instead of pngs because of 4 inter-related things:

1) There's a noticeable hick-up and lag between frames as the pngs take longer to write to disk...
2) Which is because the pngs are of larger file size, and 7200 pngs can run 40 GBs, while that many jpegs is around 4-7GBs or so usually (off the top of my head, without doing statistical research)
3) And the H264 video codec, or any video codec, is going to compress the pixel data no matter what. For my processess: It gets compressed a little at generation down to jpegs, then again when I use Virtual Dub to meld the jpeg frames (and the audio) into one .avi using H264, and then again it's compressed when I take that .avi into Adobe Premiere and add titles, transition effects, and watermark logos to the edges and then output a finished .mp4 file (which both Vimeo and Youtube seem to prefer, although they'll take pretty much anything.) So compression chain is probably Mandelbulber to JPEG to H264 (.avi file) to H264 (.mp4) at 80 mb/s.
4) And Vimeo and Youtube then FURTHER compress my videos even though it's still 1920 by 1080 but they turn the data rate WAYYYY down, Youtube more than Vimeo. At least Vimeo will let you download the original file, which is the only way to see the wondrous beauty of the Mandelbulber OpenCl 3D fractal animation videos (or the 2.08 CPU-rendered ones for that matter). They all result in horribly compressed videos at YouTube.

So I just use the jpeg setting and save a lot of hard drive space, even though I have a 24TB NAS set up to capture fractals and videos.