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Fractal Art => Movies Showcase (Rate My Movie) => Topic started by: trumanbrown on November 02, 2011, 09:50:53 AM




Title: Trip to 1.358E9
Post by: trumanbrown on November 02, 2011, 09:50:53 AM
Inspired by the amazingly deep work of teamfresh, I threw together this (no so deep) 3D zoom.

Thanks for watching!

http://www.browngrafix.com/trip-to-1358e9 (http://www.browngrafix.com/trip-to-1358e9)


Title: Re: Trip to 1.358E9
Post by: kameelian on November 04, 2011, 07:09:53 PM
Hi again Truman,

Sounds interesting but I'm really not sure I've grasped at all what you are saying you've done here:

Quote
The finished collection of 21000 frames was then used to create variously speed-paced sub-collections (i.e., batch 1 = every 3rd frame, batch 2 = every 5th frame, batch 3 = every 10th frame, etc.).  These batchs were then used to manually synch the zoom to the audio without relying on the time stretching functions of a video editor ....

any easier light?

...and yeah, wouldn't it be great if they all rendered at the speed of 640x480. I (have to) do all my main ones at 1920x1080 and even then the compiling to vid is rubbish.

regards
Kam



Title: Re: Trip to 1.358E9
Post by: trumanbrown on November 05, 2011, 11:54:22 PM
Hi Kam -

Yeah, I suppose it does sound a bit vague and convoluted.  I think I tried to explain the solution without really explaining the problem.  Sorry about that.  That's what happens when you mix alcohol with a keyboard.

The problem that I was trying to address was how to avoid the loss of quality incurred when modifying the rate of speed of a video clip (especially digitally created clips).  I use Premiere and a handful of other popular video editors and have experienced similar problems with all of them when attempting to synch video to audio by rate-stretching.  Squeezing or stretching a clip always seems to create a "blurred" effect as the editor removes and/or interpolates the frames to the new length.  For example, segment 1:08 to 1:12 in My Little Boxed Garden (http://www.fractalforums.com/movies-showcase-(rate-my-movie)/my-little-boxed-garden/ (http://www.fractalforums.com/movies-showcase-(rate-my-movie)/my-little-boxed-garden/)) was squeezed down about 3 or 4 hundred percent in order to speed up the "growth" of the plants.  I know it's a little hard to tell, but that segment of the video is blurred.

It's entirely possible that I'm just ignorant of a simple solution within Premiere itself, but the work-around that I came up with was to avoid rate-stretching within the editor entirely.  Since there's currently no direct audio keyframing function in MB3D, that meant either (1) carefully planning out the animation keyframes in advance with the audio in mind or (2) coming up with a different solution.  I went with (2).  My alternate solution was to render the entire animation at a somewhat slow 200 frames between keyframes.  For this animation, the final result was a little over 21000 frames rendered.  I then wrote a batch file that would copy frames from that original batch of 21000 frames into another folder at whatever step rate I desired (i.e., copy every 5th frame, 10th frame, or whatever).  This allowed me to effectively create crisp, untouched 3X, 5X, 10X, 15X, and 30X versions of the original animation.  I then patched together these different versions as needed in Premiere to vary the video speed with the audio beat.  As noted in my blog post, the final number of frames that were actually used was around 3000.

Unfortunately, even without alcohol I may still not be explaining this clearly.  I do hope you got the gist of it though.

Truman


Title: Re: Trip to 1.358E9
Post by: kameelian on November 06, 2011, 01:40:17 PM
Hi Truman,

Thanks for trying to explain.

It can be difficult to synchronise music and video (i.e not just playing something in the background)

Once I have committed animation frames into a video, I don't tend to do any more stretching or shrinking - but try o fit the sound to the video.

I guess you are just using things that are unavailable to me and this is why I could not understand what you were trying to do.

It would be good if there was a kind of formula to beat-match so many frames. Maybe someone has it - but not me - yet.

regards
Kam