ipxstudios

I am rendering an animation 720 x 480 for DVD. I am having real difficulty getting a good resolution - the client is telling me it is too blurry. If I render it with more detail it starts to look artificial. I am rendering it in the "medium-animation" setting and have already rendered out a LC and IR map.
I believe the problem is that you can't pack smaller pixels into a frame this size, therefore you can't get good detail until you are rendering out to a larger size frame. Is that what you would do, then resize it in combustion or after effects.
Thanks in advance for some suggestions.

crazy homeless guy

are you showing him still frames of the animation for approval?

...or, how are you showing him the piece for approval? ...some codec blur images more than others. i remember experimenting with an mpeg2 codec for playback off of my harddrive. it was blurry.

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travis schmiesing

ipxstudios

I sent a fifteen second animation (individual frames) - which looked fine on my screen but they ran it through after effects to put it together and they said it came out rather blurry. It looked kind of pixelated on my screen too - but I wasn't getting any flickering. Any ideas?

Chad Warner

If they put it through after effects, then it sounds like a compression problem on their end, and not a problem with the frames.

Brian Smith

It all comes down to image sampling and antialiasing. The only thing you can do to increase the sharpness without increasing side effects like flickering and pixel dancing is to render high and convert down. It's basically like supersampling. If you render twice the resolution and convert down, you will notice a drastic difference in sharpness. The area filter when scaled down might look like almost as sharp the catmull-rom filter.

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Brian Smith
www.3dats.com
3D Architectural Training Solutions

nicnic

Is this something you do in practice Brian?
If I ahve the time next animation im going to try it out.

ipxstudios

Brian;

Would you increase the frame sizes for the animation then decrease the size to 720 x 480 in post? I thought that might work but then it would increase render times too.

Brian Smith

yes i do it all the time...though the output size varies depending on the time and computers we have available. we try to shoot for twice the resolution ie, 1440x972 but really anything higher helps. our video editor scales it down for in final cut though you could quickly and easily do it in video post.

Here's an interesting post that talks about it more. rendering high and converting down is something quite a few people do.
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/20849-...nimations.html

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Brian Smith
www.3dats.com
3D Architectural Training Solutions

ipxstudios

Fantastic thanks for the tip Brian I'll try it.

landrvr1

Wait a sec.

If you tested this out on your screen, and the individual frames looked good, than the problem is likely to be your After Effects output settings. Can you post those?

Do you use Premiere? There's no reason to export from After Effects if you don't have to...

In fact, post an image from the sequence as well. Are you outputing as .tif files?