How do I make a Zoom movie?

[stardust4ever]

Rendering finished earlier tonight. Now trying to generate a single AVI under 2Gb.

Got a nice minty AVI file: 3'19", 1280x720, x264, High Profile, Film preset, Constant Quatizer =23, Very Slow, 1.85 Gbytes.

Funny thing, you can't even see the zoomed out Mandelbrot in the early seconds due to the slow color banding and black zero index.

I'll get it uploaded to Youtube. Hopefully YT doesn't destroy the quality too much but I know it will. Fingers crossed...

Coming to the "Rate my Video" forum soon...

[stardust4ever]

Wow, Youtube really puked on this one. I normally use H264, High Profile, CQ 17. To save a proper AVI, I had to go up to CQ 23 just to get the 3'19" video to fit under 2Gb. Youtube compresses it to less than one twelfth it's original file size and the results are not pretty...

http://www.fractalforums.com/movies-showcase-%28rate-my-movie%29/sandstone-zoom-into-the-edge-of-the-large-cardioid/

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

 

[Kalles Fraktaler]

I think it is still excellent!
If you would upload the original to Mega, I would definitely download it

[stardust4ever]

I think it is still excellent!
If you would upload the original to Mega, I would definitely download it

Just an FYI, the bit rate is crazy high so you'll need a fairly robust CPU to view the movie without hiccups. That shouldn't be an issue for most on these forums but I doubt it will play successfully on any mobile devices.

I signed up for a Mega.co.nz account today. Currently uploading the zoom movie, but it is slow go @50kb/s. About 10 hours left... Surprisingly it's not my DSL that's limiting the uplink speed (I typically get 200-250kb/s uplink). I assume there is some sort of file permissions setting to make the file links public. I would never trust the "cloud" for private stuff. Buy a pair of external drives for backup and go nuts...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/01/nude-photographs-of-a-list-celebrities-stolen-from-cloud-service-and-posted-online/
 

[stardust4ever]

https://mega.co.nz/#!K1kSjB7I!wjd2wExJPdji0EepUnbpbIMSR1rHykHPkzFtSR4shy0
 

[Kalles Fraktaler]

Excellent!

The movie looks corrupted at start on my laptop, but from e007 it works perfect.

Unfortunately the frame edges are visible on the densest passages.
Maybe I should consider blending the pixels instead of just pasting the next squeezed frames on top of the others.
And should I try to differentiate the blend ratio by measuring how far the pixels are from the center...
FX is blending the frames, right?

[youhn]

The youtube remix was just ... no comment.


The H264, High Profile, CQ 17 is WAY better! Pleasure watching. I like the 4-way saddle points, which are a nice blend of smooth geometrics and the more grainy fractal stuff. The shapes found between e46 and e48 create some kind of optical illusion. The zooming makes my brain think it also rotates ... which it doesn't. 

Why hasn't some color cycling been added to this zoom ... ?!?

[stardust4ever]

X264 CQ=23 (lower number = higher quality and file size). I normally use CQ 17 for fractal vids as a small amount of tearing results from smooth gradients at higher compression levels but this zoom has very little smooth gradients aside from the opening seconds and CQ23 still preserves the details. Try rewinding the zoom as it loads if it's tearing on start as it might still be buffering the video when playback starts. You really do need a fast CPU (>2Ghz) to play it without glitching. My 2006 MiniMac (Upgraded to OSX 10.6 Core 2 Duo @2.0Ghz) can't play it without glitching and neither does my fiance's 2010 Lenovo laptop (Windows 7 32-bit, 2.2Ghz Core 2 duo). In hindsight, I probably should have checked the "reduced CPU" option which decreases the algorithm efficiency. I primarily use VLC Media Player btw.

As for encoding, I used 3480x2160 frames for 3x3 antialias. Somebody warned me not to go over 4k resolutions, plus it took 3 days to render even at moderate zoom level. Really this area needs around 6x6 antialias to really look smooth, and even then it would still have a sandstone like texture.

Rectangular frames are a problem when rendering Fratal videos regardless of the way they are blended because there is always a 2x increase in definition across the edges of frames. I can often see two such jumps if I freeze-frame the AVI: Equivalent to just a hair over 1.5x1.5 near the edge,  3x3 in the interior, and 6x6 in the center. Fractal Extreme stores zoom frames as bitmaps (8-bit for standard zooms; 24-bit for AA zooms) rather than raw iteration data, but the effect is still similar. FX frames tend to be slightly blurry/pixellated towards the edges, KF is slightly more noisy.

I need to make a post about this somewhere, but perhaps polar coordinates would be a better strategy for fractal zoom videos. I came up with the idea some time back while watching some of my own FX video renders of the ABS variants (burning ship, etc) and noticed the edges of frames were sometimes visible. Mandelbrot is a flat 2D plane. Think of the zoom path as a long cylindrical tube rather than a progression of still images. Pixels get smaller at an exponential rate as you zoom down. Keyframing would only be necessary on the terminous of the journey (to prevent a circular black hole), and to prevent boghing the CPU by needlessly antialiasing millions of pixels at the center. No sudden changes in definition as with rectangular frames, but a smooth increase in definition towards the center. Also with polar coordinates, the fractal could be rotated endlessly without loss of fidelity. The quality would be defined by specifying the circomference and depth per zoom in pixels. For a clean antialiased picture, you would want the circomference of the zoom tube to be larger than the perimeter of the output video frame.

As for colors, I used my own simple 4-color interpretation of the default "Ultrafractal" color palette because I liked the way it looked in Mandel Machine:
(0,0,0)
(255,128,0)
(255,255,255)
(0,128,255)
repeat infinitely, 40x scaling...

I haven't yet experimented with waves or color cycling yet, but I plan on holding onto the iteration frame data for a while so I assume tgey can be rerendered with a new palette. Each of the 193 frames is 63 megabytes, so the files are way too big to upload. Honestly I just prefer simply constant velocity zoom sequences as I don't really have the patience to bother with keyframing.