Hi,
What the best file format and working prctice to obtain a clean-as-possible outline rendered animation?
The model is set to “pen” display mode with full white background and I’d like to make an animation of this display mode.
When I render out the animation within Bongo and create a video, the quality is moderate at best. So, I decided to render out the images separately as jpg’s and stitch them to a video in After Effects, hoping to have more control over the file compression. But I can’t get a small file: 30 seconds of 1920*1080 format results in 3GB. Not usable for web at all.
Anyone here who has experience with rendering animation with outlines and might have some pointers?
Do you mean that with the proper encoding settings, even the Bongo renderer can produce a top-notch video? Or should I focus on some other software (like AE)?
You can create the video in Bongo, and then transcode using another tool.
But when creating animations it is generally a good practice to render out first in separate frames, and only at the end put it all together as a video file.
It makes it much easier to adjust only a couple spots of the animation without having to rerender everything.
Yes, that was my initial take on this too, but then still ended up with 3GB. I’ll see if I can get better output by playing with the settings
The thing with lines drawings however, is that any compression is obvious quite fast. Lines are either crisp or bad, there isn’t much in the image to hide the lower quality.
So I’m wondering if there are any image file types or video container types that are more suitable for(animated) lines drawings.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re referring to, but yes, if you’re doing FullHD images (1080p) at 30FPS for 30 seconds then, if each image is ~3MB in size, you’ll end up with 2.7GB worth of images.
Animations I always edit in Blender, but you can use any software you like to create the final video file. I like Blender because it is a great video editing software and gives me the control I like, especially when doing post-processing, color grading, adding VFX/3D, etc afterwards. I suppose After Effects will do the same there for you.
You should be able to create a high-quality video from 3GB worth of images. Encode to MP4 and make sure you have sane bitrate settings and you should be fine.
Nathan is correct.
Also, when you render out the frames, use PNG format, JPG will always look “Jittery”.
The initial file size will be higher, but much higher quality.
I use Adobe After Effects to create the H.264 video from PNG frames.
Ok, AE isn’t the best place to render video’s for web it seems. It’s best for lossless high quality videos. For more lossy compression, it’s best to render with Media Encoder. (also launchable from within AE) That brought my video back from 3GB (AE render queue) to a more manageable 7MB.