DVS Creative Blog

XYZ: An Overview on Multi-Pass Rendering with Gunther

First of all, who is Gunther?

Gunther is a character created by DVS Creative . He will act as our protagonist in a series of stories, both still and animated. Gunther, the robot, serves as our always accessible outlet to tell a quick story and also experiment in 3d modeling, lighting, UV mapping, rigging, rendering, and pretty much anything else related to working in the XYZ.

Here, I've decided to show a breakdown going through a multi-pass render. A multi-pass render consists of breaking down your scene into many different layers, ultimately giving a much higher level of control when tweaking after the render, here we rendered into a .psd (Photoshop) file where we can tweak, blend, and color the layers together into a finished piece. Specific render layers include an Ambient Occlusion pass, for more realistic shadow caustics, a Global Illumination pass to achieve more photorealistic lighting, a glow pass, passes for each individual lighting grid, and a final shadow pass. After these are all rendered out we take the file into Photoshop for some tweaking of all the above layers and a final color pass is then made. Here I used the primary Levels, Curves, and Gradient Map features inside of after effects to give it a warmer feel. Look forward to more 3D from us in the future.

Scene textures provided by CMIVFX. Original robot model by DVS Creative.

Taking the Jump: What to expect upgrading from Adobe CS4 to CS5

A new version of Adobe CS5, and subsequently an updated After Effects (our primary compositing tool) is due to arrive in less than a month. There are some pretty exciting features that make the CS4 to CS5 upgrade much more viable than the jump Adobe took into CS4 from CS3 with their VFX tool. What can you expect out of the new Adobe After Effects? I'll break it down in order of importance:

1) 64 bit operating support: While some may need to update hardware, this is a significant push to make After Effects a faster compositing tool, utilizing your computers processor speed for faster previewing. Previewing a project with many layered effects can be one of the most time consuming stops on the production line. Also, keep in mind if your library of plugins are 64-bit compatible. Red Giant, makers of the industry standard particle emitter Particular and other widely used effects like Form and Shine, have opted for small fees for upgrading your plugins through them for a less painful jump to a new version. A 30% improvement is said to be typical.

2) RotoBrush: Adobe has opted out of the "cut-out" for the "paint-in." The cleanest, fastest way to rotoscope today is keyframing masks, frame by frame. Although this allows for ultimate control it is extremely time consuming as the compositor is breaking down a video into thousands of images and painting elements in/out individually. The new Rotobrush is a practical effect that is a brush driven rotoscope, see John Dickinson's (Motionworks) tutorial exploring the tool here: http://bit.ly/aKfTTV

3) Color lookup tables. Lookup tables are derived from hardware devices that transform the range of the colors in your video stream for representation and display on your monitor. A modified Color Finesse (which has become our main grading solution) interface will allow for a more consistent, and faster workflow. Color correct and grade across projects with many different scenes (balances) by applying a color treatment across the different layers in our outside of After Effects. The tables can be shared with different users on a network and even on different programs. And while we are on color, After Effects had also made an upgrade to encode and decode the Quicktime codecs that are imported in for a more accurate interoperation across many different softwares (think Final Cut Pro.) Read even more about After Effects CS5 here from the project manager himself:  http://blogs.adobe.com/keyframes/2010/04/introducing_after_effects_cs5.html

Working with Animals

We were commissioned by Bissell to produce four promotional videos for their new pet care product line “Pawsitively Clean,” which are items specifically designed for cleaning up the different messes that pets make.  The four products we focused on were (we love these names) ewww®, yowza!, dang!, and yecch. 

This was an exciting experience for DVS Creative, as we worked with several adopted dogs for the production.  In collaboration with Director Ken Schmidt, we held auditions, or “dogditions” as Mike called them, to see which pets would work well for each product.  Not only were we looking at physical attributes of each candidate, but the pets needed to be mild mannered and show us that they would take direction from his or her owner.  We found that you don’t need to be afraid of working with non-professionally trained animals on a scripted production, you just need to be prepared and patient.

For ewww®, we selected a sprightly Pomeranian named Medo.  She is incredibly cute and took direction well, but about 15 minutes into the production she decided to say hello to all of the crew members during taping.  Who could blame her with so much going on?

Yowza! is a brush that attaches to the hose of most any vacuum, so it sucks up hair as you brush your pet.  To demonstrate this tool we selected a dog named Krickit. She is a golden retriever with long hair and loves to be brushed.  She is well trained and was very easy to work with. 

The next product: Yecch, is an innovative window drool cleaner that includes a brush and squeegee all in one.   To show this we needed a pet that could administer a hearty helping of slobber to a slider door window, and Dexter the Bull Mastiff was just the dog for the job.  We helped him out a little bit by mixing some baking powder and water to apply to the window for a dried-on look. Showing this in tandem with Dexter’s floppy jowls gave us the look we were aiming for! 

Finally, for dang! we were looking for a sweet dog that had the look of innocence and regret.  Shaelie the Beagle was a great match.  We asked a lot of Shaelie, and she worked very well along with her owner to get us the shots we needed.

Keeping the production on schedule was highly attributed to how well the pets cooperated with their owners, and also to the preparedness of our team.  Remember that pre-production is an important part of any production, especially when working with animals.  Click here to see all of the videos!

Useful Utilities: MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 software

We were recently at an event where this piece of software was mentioned and were surprised that more people haven’t heard of it.  MPEG Streamclip is one of the most useful and time saving utilities we have. It reads different MPEG streams and allows you to convert them to other formats, or simply extract the individual streams for use in other programs.  Did we mention the program is free? It requires the QuickTime MPEG plugin, which comes with Final Cut Studio, or is $20 if you need to buy it separately for your Mac or Windows computer.

 

The main thing we use MPEG Streamclip for is working with DVDs. You can open the VOB files (Video Object files that make up the structure of a Video DVD) from non-copy protected DVDs in MPEG Streamclip, and demux, or separate, them back into video and audio streams or convert them to a transport or program stream for playback off of a computer. You can also select in and out points to extract just segments of an MPEG Stream, but note that it will not be exactly frame accurate, as it will have to split  the stream at the start of a GOP (Group of Pictures, a segment of the MPEG video stream structure), so it should be accurate to within half a second or so. 

 

This is extremely handy for those times when a client has a couple of DVDs and they want to combine them into one disc, or make a DVD of just one of a series of TV spots. You can simply demux the streams back to the original video and audio files and build the new DVD without having to re-encode the videos, which will degrade the quality of the footage.

 

Another handy feature of MPEG Streamclip is working with QuickTime movies. It will let you do the same things with QuickTime movies as it can do with MPEG Streams, so you can extract segments and encode them to other formats for use on your computer. When working with QuickTime movies, Streamclip is frame accurate, so you can extract the exact segment you want and convert it to a proof for a client. It doesn’t have quite as many features for editing as QuickTime Pro does but it is free and works on both Mac and Windows.

 

MPEG Streamclip also works with streams from many video cameras, from consumer grade all the way up to DSLRs, that shoot MPEG-4 video clips.  Streamclip can open those clips and convert them to Quicktime movies or AVIs in many codecs your computer can handle (DV, H.264, even Uncompressed 10 bit) so you can edit with them or play them back on your computer. It can also export stills from any stream it can read.

 

MPEG Streamclip is available for both Mac and Windows from http://www.squared5.com/

 

 

Boy Scouts of America Tour DVS: Future DVS Employees?

On January 12^th and 13^th the halls of DVS were filled with excitement as we hosted Cub Scout Pack #3264 .  With Salesman Drew Veach and Senior Creative Technician Phil Gibson as their intrepid tour guides, the Scouts were introduced to the many fun and exciting aspects of what we do here at DVS.  Some of the highlights included viewing recently completed high definition video of dogs (and the people they shed on) in our edit suite, seeing the numerous mastering decks and even more numerous flickering lights of our machine room, and a humorous, hands on look at how a green screen and keying works, complete with an interactive weather map demonstration and an American flag background.  As a memento of the occasion, DVS provided the Pack with a DVD documenting their green screen experience.

 

Some interesting questions we heard:

Do you know how to make a Blu-Ray?

What’s a VHS?

Can you make us look like zombies?

 

 

The Return of the Format War: CBHD vs. Blu-Ray?

 

Most people know the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD format war ended with the unceremonious concession of HD-DVD to Blu-Ray in January of 2008.  This was evidenced by the production of HD-DVD players and discs ceasing within the following six months.  What most people don’t know is that the war is not over yet.  CBHD, also known as China Blue High Definition, has risen from the ashes of what was HD-DVD.  CBHD is very similar to HD-DVD in disc size and manufacturing techniques, with some differences in how the video is encoded and played back as well as programming format.  Now what is it about the new Blu-Ray vs. CBHD battle that you should know, and is CBHD a real contender?

First of all, Blu-Ray is expensive to manufacture. There has been no real competition to Blu-Ray since HD-DVD went bust, but by the same token, Blu-Ray hasn’t been exactly flying off the shelves either.  Since winning the format war the price of some players have dropped (more due to the influx of vendors than direct competition), but the discs are still fairly expensive to manufacture and as a result, purchase.  Studios aside, hardly anyone is willing to pay the exorbitant fees that come with Blu-Ray replication.  There was an expectation that the media would have been cheaper after being on the market so long but the price really hasn’t changed much.  At a corporate level Blu-Ray has an audience mostly for tradeshows and other large format presentations, but when it comes to large-scale manufacturing the costs have been too prohibitive for most corporate uses.

Second, CBHD is less expensive to manufacture.  Like HD-DVD, existing replication machines can be retro-fitted in order to make the cost of manufacturing cheaper than Blu-Ray, which requires all new equipment. 

Third, the Chinese government is backing CBHD over Blu-Ray in order to provide cheaper entertainment to the Chinese people in these tough economic times.  Warner Brothers, realizing that English is a 2^nd language in China, started creating some of their titles in CBHD and as of September 2009, Universal Studios and National Geographic followed suit with announcements that Paramount and BBC/Discovery will be doing the same.  At this point CBHD is already ahead of Blu-ray sales in China.

 

Most assuredly this got the attention of Blu-Ray, which decreased the cost to manufacture in June of 2009.  So does this make CBHD a real contender?  Possibly, but only time will tell for certain.  Of course, it is also only a matter of time before HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) is on the market with its uncompressed video and enough storage to hold 200 DVDs worth of content, but that is a blog for another day.