HD Animations - How too?

[Smalerbi]

Hello all,

I have read several discussions on this form about NTSC and PAL formats for DVD’s, however, with plasma and LCD set’s becoming more and more prevalent, I would like to take the next step into the arena of high definition animations. I have no idea how this is done, so I was hoping if someone out there in the know could please share there expertise in this area.

If I understand this correctly, a frame for high definition animations at 16:9 needs to be rendered at 1920x1080. If this is correct, and not to sound like a total dope, what is the post production process to create a polished product that we are so accustom to seeing on our HDTV’s.

Thanks in advance,

Scott.

[panthon]

As i see it right now, there's a gap between what u want to get and what's technically feasible.

You can render your animation to any HD specification, as 1920X1080 (if you can afford these huge, monstersized rendertimes), composite it using the same resolution and edit it. You end up with your final video in HD resolution. That's no different from rendering to standard PAL or NTSC.

And then...what? Nextgen players supporting HDDVD and bluray are not even known to most of users, are expensive and not production proven, yet.
Unless you and your client has access to new gen players or maybe some hard-disk based devices u won´t have an easy way to play it.

I´m a big HD fan, and bout to purchase a HD cam, but I guess we're not there yet. Maybe in a year or two...

Let´s see what other users think about it!

[Smalerbi]

[quote="panthon"]As i see it right now, there's a gap between what u want to get and what's technically feasible.

mmmmm…..perhaps you are right, however, it is being done or something similar to it. I realize what I am asking for may only be limited to large production FX houses with there multi-million dollar budgets and more computer processing power then we can possibly imagine. What I am asking for is the post production process that gives us the awesome product that we all drool over. This does not mean we need a complex scene with thousands of objects in it; I’m referring to the refined and polished animation. For example, I’m not sure how many Xbox 360 users we have here but one of the games “Ghost Recon” has an intro animation that is pretty slick. When I look at this on my 50” plasma screen, it looks pretty damn good and even the video game graphics look clean and that is in real time.

When I render out to NTSC resolution, burn it to DVD and play it on my plasma…….well it leaves much to be desired and that is an understatement. I too am curious what other users or professionals may have to say.

Thanks for the feedback.

[gilpo]

Smalerbi,
We, too, have been less than impressed by our product on DVD. Switching to progressive has helped but it still doesn't look as good as hollywood DVDs. No matter what we do, we can't seem to get Pixar quality out of our DVDs. Our uncompressed AVIs are beautiful and it makes us sick to see them on the final DVD.

Would definitely like to hear from others as to why hollywood dvd's seem to look better. (cpnichols? morbid? are you around?)

[instinct]

encoding to DVD is an art and science of itself....for one mpeg2 is not mpeg2...hard to explain, but there IS a quality difference in encoders, not only a speed difference. So having a cinemacraft xtream on the backhand will surely look better in shorter time then the usual shareware encoder, or beware some editing tool's built in encoding. But even going highend on the encoding side still leaves quite of a leap to the pros...dunno why...

Dunno if Chris is of help here, as i assume he's out already when a DVD is done (the lucky bastard :P ) But if i am wrong i'd love to get some insights!

Thorsten

[Dynedain]

Our uncompressed AVIs are beautiful and it makes us sick to see them on the final DVD.

Would definitely like to hear from others as to why hollywood dvd's seem to look better. (cpnichols? morbid? are you around?)

Because the Hollywood production houses spend tens of thousands (perhaps even hundreds) to optimize the compression during the DVD authoring process.

[panthon]

I think we are mixing things up.
One thing is getting the mpeg2 compressor to work properly, that's creating pristine quality mpeg2 from your footage. As fas as i know, big production houses use hardware mpeg2 compressors, but i don't see why you shouldn't get good results with a software encoder. I guess PIXAR quality has nothing to do with mpeg2 compression...

BUT, even the highest quality DVD (dont forget DVDs can't go beyond Standard PAL and NTSC - 720X576 in PAL) will look crappy on your plasma, no matter what, compared to a HD title. A TV capable of 1360 X whatever feeded with a 720X576 image will stretch the image to fill the screen.
It´s like zooming a low res image in photoshop.

Now take a PIxar dvd and play it on your plasma. Maybe you think it does not look bad, but that's because u haven't had the chance to see the same dvd in HD!

The ideal solution would be creating HD footage (1920X1080 progressive) and play it on a HD-ready TV set. I am talking about FULL HD TVS, able to play at 1920X1080, not 1300 something, that's not easy to find, neither cheap...And don't forget you need a HD player with HD output interface, that's not very common either...

So, if you want full quality on large TVs forget DVDs, go for HDDVDs, Blurays, computers with HD output or Hard disk based players.

[meanadam]

AH YES.... my life for the last month. It is pretty complicated isn't it?

Commerical dvd players play NTSC or PAL. NTSC is 720x480. This is obviously 4:3. If you do 16:9 you can add "extra" resolution by rendering anamorphic 16:9 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2. Thus by squashing the "extra" data into 4:3 instead of cropping it off. The picture will look normal and be full res played back at 16:9.

I just saw some blue ray disks on newegg - but I don't know if any software is out yet to burn to these disks?

Software encoders are an issue. Good luck. It took us a week and a stack of DVDs to figure out that the Nero encoder is bad.

There are a lot of other factors in commerical dvds. Look up 24p, 30p, and 3:2 pulldown on wikipedia. Not to mention what others have = they have tons of equipment, are video pros, (remember - "colorist" is a profession) and they know how to set every other knob button and switch that we don't even have on our pro-sumer gear.

[Smalerbi]

Yep..........all of the above makes sense.......thanks for the education.

[panthon]

Software encoders are an issue. It took us a week and a stack of DVDs to figure out that the Nero encoder is bad.

What are you using now to encode your videos?

[Austin]

We've been pretty satisfied with the quality of MainConcept's mpeg encoder that comes with Premiere Pro (for NTSC applications).

You can also (supposedly, I have yet to test it) use an XBox 360 to playback HD-WMV files. Converting to HD-WMV proved to be a really painful task, as Windows Media Encoder had a hard time even opening uncompressed hd-res .avi files longer than 10 seconds or so. This was on a 32-bit system, though.

[panthon]

You can also (supposedly, I have yet to test it) use an XBox 360 to playback HD-WMV files.

A hard disk based HD player would do the trick too. But i don't really know what kind of format u should feed it. WMV doesnt seem to be the greatest format in my opinion, i would go for quicktime hd H.264 instead. The XBOX idea is rather interesting, though...maybe it's a matter of finding the right compressor and settings and voila! . If the xbox refuses to play the video when u are showing it to your client, you could always load a game and cheer the client up by letting him win.

[ene.xis]

If the xbox refuses to play the video when u are showing it to your client, you could always load a game and cheer the client up by letting him win.

[Austin]

Who makes a hard-disk HD player? I did a quick search but didn't find anything.

[panthon]

Who makes a hard-disk HD player? I did a quick search but didn't find anything.

UHmm yeah that's a good question, indeed!

I read about one in a magazine with HDMI output, but maybe they havent hit the market yet. However it seems very unlikely providing that the technology required to create such a player already exists...
I' ll look for it.