Questions on animation settings and video editing

Knittingmommy

What are the best settings for animations that we do in DS?  Is there a typical frame rate?  What encoding do you animators usually use?  What resolutions?  What size image do you render out your videos?  Any tips on setting up and editing videos for YouTube in particular would be helpful.

I've tried both rendering as an movie and as an image series.  It's really hard to find an editing program that can handle importing an image series.  I forget what I used in Windows on my first animation last year.  Now that I'm in Linux again, I have several options of video editors that come with Linux.  Flowblade, which I tried out for my last animation, will import an image series.  I just tried OpenShot this morning with a new animation and was pleasantly surprised that it, too, will import an image series and will actually ask if you want to import a series of images as just that, an image series.  Yay!  

All of the video editing software seems to have a wide variety of settings and options for exporting your videos.  It's hard to track down what the optimal setting should be for an animation if you are just getting started.  Right now, I'm doing 30 frames per second as that seems to be the default inside DS.  However, I've read that most other software seems to use 25 frames per second.  I've been playing with different settings, but I have no idea what the optimal settings for exporting my animations from the video software is yet.

So, for all of you animators out there, please share your tips and wisdom for newbies on how you setup your animation, your settings, and what software you use.  I'd be especially interested in anyone else who also uses Linux and open source software for their video editing.

Ivy

Personally I use Adobe premiere pro cs5 for my film editor.   But you if your looking for something for free to learn how to edit film.  you can get hitfilm https://hitfilm.com/express  for free and do everything you'll ever need to do for film editing.. it handles both png image series and movie files .

On  creating  movie files I can't speak for other people on how they make their films.  But I prefer to render & save to Movie, and save a copy of the temp render folder that holds all the PNGs  rendered before compiling them into one avi using image compliler codex.  . I also choose & use Microsoft AVI uncompressed for the codex.. this way you can do your final film edit in any\ format.  and use them in any film editor on the market ..AVI uncompressed do make large final  file size. So I save to AVI "unless"?  I need to make a special scene then I will use individual PNG in series.  which brings us  to your next question  image size?.   I render any film I am uploading  to the internet in HD which is 1080  and your animation needs to fit into that space. which is 1920 x 1080 dpi  . I run my key frames at 30 kfps (key frames pre seconds). .. you can make animation at 24kfps . but IMO  it seems to appear to make 3d animations  jitter. 24kfps is better suited for flat 2d animations.   Just a side note, I learned for better quality films, if I am rendering iray, to render my images  at 2560 x 1440 so when I save my final film animation in1080HD the  reducing the film size from 1440 to 1080 in my Adobe film editor helps reduce of some of the graininess you get in Iray when rendering animation sometimes

I hope that helps  good luck 

Knittingmommy

@Ivy  Thanks for piping in.  I have a couple of film editors I'm playing around with.  I have Hitfilm in Windows, but I'm hardly ever in Windows so I ended up looking into what is available in Linux.  Turns out there are a few pretty good ones.  The problem is that there are so many options for rendering out the final film that I wasn't sure what the best option was to choose for my output.  Now, I know. Thanks.  The short test animations that I did within the last couple of days were all done at 1920 x 1080 so at least I got something right.  I also rendered in DS at 30 fps and kept the 30 fps for my final output.  I had read that some use 24 fps and there seems to be some American standard for TV at 29.97 fps.  Don't know why they don't just call it 30 fps there, but oh well.  I guess keeping it at 30 fps which seems to be the default in DS was a good choice for me.

That's actually a great idea about rendering larger for Iray.  I do that occasionally for my still images, but didn't think about doing the same things for my animations.  I'll try that next time.  

So far, I've tried both ways of rendering out my animations, image series and movie.  I'm not sure which I prefer yet.  I'll probably keep playing with both ways for a while.  Right now, I'm working on doing a kind of portfolio of my still art in the video editor just to get familiar with the editor and transitions and stuff.  I have three editors to choose from in Linux that seem to be pretty good.  The only way I'm going to figure out which one I like best is to play with them so I'll be doing some more animations in the near future.  I've got a slightly longer one that I've already started story boarding so we'll see if I can manage to get something together that's longer than a 2 second test clip.  I'm also working on doing my own walk cycle which should be kind of fun.

Baby steps.  I still have a lot to learn and a long way to go.

Ivy

This was all done in Iray rendered at 1440 and reduced to 1080hd on final edit  I hand keyframed  90% of this animation.

Knittingmommy

@Ivy I saw that and you did an excellent job.  I've been playing with handkeying the keyframes.  I did that with my last two test animations to kind of figure things out while researching the whole walk cycle thing.  It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, but it was still hard.  I think I've finally kind of know what I'm doing.

Do you use graphmate at all?  I still haven't exactly figured out how to use that yet.  I did all of my keyframes in keyMate.  I still have some things to figure out, but I'm getting there.

Ivy

I hardly use key-mate anymore.  I found that Animate2 has  about the same functions as far as stacking keyframes go. and  when it comes to aniblocks  you can break the aniblocks down to their keyframes by double clicking them to edit them  . I do use graphmate a lot for bending animation movements.. a good example would be a car skidding around a corner..  I make a 90 degree animation turn with my car and then make adjustments with graph-mate slowly to  bring to the animation curve to the point the car looks like its skidding sideways ,but still going forward in motions,.. in the gymnastic animation I used graphic mate to help me make the Uneven bars part  in bending motions for the flips ... I only rarely use keymate  unless I need something really detailed.  like close ups or fingers & hand movement s .. but i rarely use it  I can pretty much do the same in animate  2 timeline.

 

 everyone has their own way of doing things  you just need to find what works best for you.  ..  having a good work flow is the most important thing to me, to keep thing organize. it makes getting a project complete much easier .I look at the task of making animation like a puzzle ..   there are many many pieces to it  .  . I have 2 Halloween animated films  I'll be releasing soon.

Knittingmommy

@Ivy  I'm still learning the workflow part down.  I'm still all over the place as far as that goes.  I do use animate 2 and I have a ton of aniblocks.  I'm still mostly playing with the things I have been trying to figure my way around.  Give me a couple of years and I might get something really decent.  I have a long way to go before I get good at it.  I'm just plugging away and adding to my skillset bit by bit.  :)

Ivy

your absolutely right, and that is how i started, by plugging away learning one thing at a time. and I still have a wicked long way to go learning. I have a pretty good grasp on using daz studio though so that is a bg help . I have a great work flow. .I watched a show one day that the animators at dreams works had showed how they set up their work flow for building their animations so I kind of tried to copy what they did  and just customized it a little to fit my needs .

like I said there is no right or wrong,  somethings are easy to learn some things are down right hard or impossibles to do in daz studio  and you will need to look at 3rd party software or plugins to fill those gaps.  just a lot of trial and error. I have a old external hard drive stored away with 100's of test animations I have done over the years but never showed them .. maybe someday I'll make a blooper film animation or something..lol