Finishing Touches

I thought I would be quite clever and make a DVD cover and DVD label. I have one of those printers which allows you to print straight onto a DVD. I will admit, it took a couple of attempts to get the DVD looking how I wanted it. It still looks a little bit greener than it should but it clearly states my name and the fact it is my showreel.

I carried on with the room and blind theme so the DVD cover and label both have pictures of the room with the writing on the blind. I like the picture but it is not very obvious that it is a animation and modelling DVD. It looks more like an architect DVD. Even so, I think it looks quite professional and have a small sense of pride knowing that I worked so hard on it and on this project. I put a lot of time into learning DVD studio Pro and spent a lot of time rendering and editing video to get a good portfolio and some content on the DVD. It may not be all good but at least it shows what I can do.

Tomorrow I have to hand it all in so I just need to leave the DVD to dry before anyone plays it and its all ready to be handed in.

Testing

I finished my DVD and have been testing ti out. I had a few initial problems with extra buttons I had created out of nowhere so when I used the mouse select a button to take me to another menu, it was taking me completely the wrong menu. This soon got sorted after a while searching through different menus and backgrounds. I managed to get it looking exactly the way I want it.

I had to add the bars and tones to our estings entry and this was a very confusing process for me. I couldnt quite grasp the concept of why we needed to use it and all about the timecodes. All I knew was that we had been given this file that needed to start at some random timecode, play for so many seconds then it eventually played our animation. I managed to do it with some help and I think I did it correctly as my animation started to play at exactly 10:00:00. However, if someone asked me to do it again on my own, I wouldnt have a clue what to do.

After this was accomplished, I burnt it onto a DVD but again the rendering was playing up. After a bit of searching and digging into the settings, I realised that the file was almost  1gb which is not surprising that it kept skipping. I used compressor to get it down to about 10mb without losing quality or resolution and that meant that the estings entry for broadcast played fine.

Lastly, I had to burn my DVD with my showreel on. This was pretty easy as you just click the burn button in DVD studio and it tells you if anything is wrong which it didnt seem to be. Fifteen minutes later a DVD popped out of my drive telling me it was done. I had already tested it using simulations but I wanted to test it one last time to make sure. I put it back into my computer and tested it for a final time which seemed to go well.

Adding Content

I have had so many problems trying to add content to this DVD. It hasnt been DVD studio but After Effects. It would not render .mov files properly so they kept skipping and jumping all over the place. I could render them out in .mp4 files but DD studio would not recognise them.

Luckily I have another mac at home that I was able to borrow that also had After Effects CS5 on. This meant i could render the .mp4 files then take it over to the other mac and rerender them as .mov. The problem I had with this is losing quality. The quality would have been majorly different and some of the films were already not a good quality. When I delved a bit deeper into the issue, I realised that the videos were not skipping at all when I simulated them on DVD studio. This meant the original .mov files were fine all along. It turns out that my computer did not have enough processor and memory free to play the files back correctly (it didnt dtop me from rendering them all again just to make sure).

Getting the files into DVD studio was easy and within about an hour, I had all eleven videos on the DVD and playing corectly with buttons linking them all and getting them to play on demand.

One thing I was slightly disappointed about was my Buddy character. All the issues meant I literally have not had any time to finish the model of him. I just need to model his hair and glasses which does not seem much but I wanted to pose him and that would have meant rigging. My aim is to finish him in the summer then use him to learn how to rig thoroughly and correctly.

I have edited so much sound over the past few days. I managed to pick eleven different tracks and take either a breakdown, instrumental or intro within their songs and create background music for my videos. I am definitely not a good music editor but my plan is for the user to concentrate more on the video than on the music.

I am very close to the finish line. I need to adjust a few little bits on the DVD and then test.

Making the DVD

I have been exploring DVD studio Pro and have found so many tutorials that had factors that I would like to incorporate into my DVD.

The main theme for my DVD is to do with a room I created for a client a while back but I loved how the scene was lit. This has lead me the the idea of my menus being on blinds. This could be quite confusing for the user at first because they just see a mass of colour with some form of bar at the bottom. To make this less confusing, I have created animations to go on top of my backgrounds. The blinds will come down and then the buttons will appear, when they select the next menu, the blind goes up and then another, different colour blind comes down.

I created this on Maya and then edited it in After Effects to get my desired effect but this is how it looks:

This is the beginning of my showreel but the blind will have different things on different menus. The blind will also be in different positions depending on which menu and different colours. 

I had a few problems making the buttons because I couldnt get the text to change colour on the rollover which meant that the user did not know what they were selecting. However, I wanted it to be perfect so I  had to recreate the whole background with my name and things on, to get the overlay colours correct so they would then change colour on select and activated. 

I have never used DVD studio pro before and I still do not know what half of the tabs mean and what they do but I have managed to make a DVD with animations between the menus and music. Now all I need to do is add the content. DVD studio has been difficult and frustrating at times but so is all new software. I think I have managed to produce a good shell of a DVD with good menu interchanges. I hope it doesnt all go wrong when I add the content.

Sound

I have gone through my whole music catalogue to find music for my different videos and also my showreel.

Some of my views are less than 10 seconds long so I have just used intros from some songs. Other videos are almost 30 seconds long so I have stitched some music from intros together to make them slightly longer. These have then been put over my videos.

Lastly I have been choosing music for my showreel. I dont know how long it is as I havent put it together but I have a selection of music I can use so ill decide when it is almost complete.

I used garageband and itunes but some music did not stitch together as seamlessly as others. I dont think it is too noticeable so I have left it in.

Editing Content

I have gathered together all the content that I need. I need to add some cameras to my models and render different points of view. I have then had to add music to match the videos.

I have done most of my editing on After Effects but I have had some major issues. After a day of 8 hours rendering my Maya decided to be really slow. Also mental ray takes about a minute to render a single frame. After all of that, my after effects decided to malfunction on me. It would render out fine but as soon as you play back the video, the sound is ok but the video keeps breaking up and will not play smoothly.

I solved the Maya issue by turning my mac off and leaving it to cool down before making it work again. Mental ray is still slow but it understandable when it has so much to render. The issue of after effects is still there but there is nothing I can do at the moment. I will try to rerender it on a different computer to see if its the files or the computer.

I have been making the shell of my dvd on dvd studio pro. I have made different pages and made buttons to different pages and videos. I will add animations between the menus to make it a bit more interesting but this means going back into Maya which is still occupied with rendering.

Flash, Rendering and After Effects

After I created the animation and set up the scene in Maya, I rendered it out. The next thing I had to do was put it into Flash. I had created the advert in Photoshop without the E4 and also crated the seats to go over the scene also in Photoshop.

I imported the image sequence form Maya into Flash (making sure it was a png sequence so would not have a background). I then imported the advert image behind the image sequence and the seats in front of the image sequence.

This is what it looked like:

I added some lighting in Maya to light the scene.

When I went to render it, it would not export it as a Quicktime .mov or a h.264 .mp4. I don't think there was anything wrong with my file but Flash kept crashing. To get around this, I exported it as another image sequence.

I took this image sequence into after effects and added the other scenes to it. The other scenes were mainly still images but they were not on the screen for very long.

Here are the other scenes:

This was created by Sarah and I added a fly to this scene so that it wasn't just a still image. It was just a black dot with a simple animation to give the impression of a fly.

The cinema scene shows everyone in their 3D glasses. It makes it more obvious that they are watching a 3D film.

This is the end scene and was created by Lily. This is after the E4 has fallen.

After it was all put into After Effects, I just had to add the sound and sound effects of the fly. I then exported it to create a .mp4 file.