Archive for the ‘TDDUP-Production Log’ Category
I’m excited to announce that I am officially finished with my short film! This morning, I ironed out the last problems with audio and burned my first few DVDs that will be sent off to festivals.
The last two and a half years have been exhausting. But, at the same time it has been the most exciting time of my professional life. It has been so enjoyable to do my own thing, not constrained by anyone other than me and father time. The finished project looks pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. Sure, there are a lot of things I would like to change if I had the energy. A shot or two could be cut, some others tightened up, I wish I had more time to animate, spent more time on rigging/deformation, I wish I had more time to do lighting and compositing. There are so many what-if’s. However, no matter what the project is and even if you are the boss, you’ve got to be realistic and just get things done.
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I’m writing this to hopefully eliminate any problems that others may have, and possibly enlighten some of you that aren’t aware of something you can do to improve DVD quality. The first thing to cover are aspect ratios. This short was rendered at 1920×820. That equates to an aspect ratio of roughly 2.35:1 (1920/820=2.341). Typical widescreen televisions have an aspect ratio of 1.78 (1920/1080=1.777). In order to get my short to properly fit on widescreen without any stretching, I added 130 lines of black on the top and 130 on the bottom of my frame (130*2=260 + 820 = 1080). This new letterboxed image now has an aspect ratio of 1.78.
The title pretty much says it all. Rendering and compositing have been finished, and the short has been assembled . There are only a few things left to do. And that is to make the final build of the DVD Festival Screener. I’m very happy to be at this point. An amazingly long journey, but well worth it. After seeing the whole thing as a finished project it is quite exciting and scary at the same time. There are plenty of things that I’d like to change to make it just a little tighter. However, at some point you need to draw the line and that line has been drawn. Time to bring this thing to an end. :)
Just as I was sprinting towards the finish line, I slowed down to a jog. Even though I’ve been working on this thing forever now, there were a lot of short cuts made to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Because of that, a few shots don’t look quite as good as they could. So, it was decided late last week that I would slow down just a little bit and make sure that it look just right.
What exactly does that mean? Well, first, I’m going through every shot, one by one and re-evaluating any last second comp changes and slight lighting shifts. I noticed that a few were inconsistent with others and needed to be adjusted. So, I figured this to be a good time to do a last second color correction on the whole short shot-by-shot. Just some fine-tuning. Nothing major. Along with these comp tweaks, I’ve done some very minor lighting changes on a few shots. Not a big deal now that RenderRocket is helping me out with some major horsepower.
Probably by the end of the week, I’ll be done with everything except the final assembly.
Another week has gone by since my last entry and quite a bit of progress has been made. First off, except for a few random frames that didn’t render properly, rendering is done! All files have been downloaded from RenderRocket, and I’m just making my way through all the shots doing the final comps.
This is going at a pretty good pace. I had a couple of shots give me some real headaches and I had to re-render a few layers here and there, but other than that, it is moving pretty efficiently. For those that wish to update their score cards, there are 21 shots left that need to be comped. I’m doing quite a few a day, so I imagine I’ll be done sometime this week.
Done? Yes, done! After the shots get through this stage, they are marked off my list for good! Nothing left to do on them. After those 21 finish, the final step is to assemble all 112 (111 CG, 1 for credits) shots together and scale them down to DVD resolution (and add audio) so that festival screeners can be cut and shipped off.
