If you’ve seen my presentation from the 2017 Blender Conference, you saw a transition effect I did for the TV show “Star” (check out 15:45 minutes into my presentation). The director wanted a transition into the mind of an actress to show what she’s thinking about, and described it as if a pencil is poking through from inside her head, and then the frame tears apart from that point, revealing the next shot underneath. (more…)
As we continue exploring ways to stabilize footage, we’re going to take a look at a plugin for VirtualDub called DeShaker. I’m betting you never heard of VirtualDub, right? (more…)
If you’ve tried to stabilize footage in Blender at any point since the inclusion of tracking tools during the production of Tears of Steel, you may have noticed a large, glaring omission – scale. Translation and rotation, no problem. But we have not been able to stabilize scale in Blender at all.
Handheld camera work is very common today, but if you’re out there shooting your own movies, sometimes you may find your footage has a high frequency shake that is just really annoying. I’ve found that the smaller the camera is, the more chance there is of introducing that jittery motion. With people shooting movies on smartphones and GoPros, cameras really can’t get much smaller! That means there is a lot of high frequency jitter in those handheld shots. (more…)
Visual effects artists work in frames sequences. That’s what we expect to get from the client, and it’s what we give back to them. EXRs, DPXs, PNGs, TIFs, even TGAs and JPGs. Compressed movies are for reviewing, but our main means of delivery on feature films are frame sequences. Independent projects can have a variety of different formats for delivery, but even then, it’s recommended that you work from frame sequences and just create the delivery movie from the final frame sequence at the end. (more…)
If you’ve ever found yourself with the need to render multiple Blender projects overnight, this is the program for you!
RenderPilot is a render manager for Blender, and if you’re working on a project with a lot of long render times, this little thing is about to become your best friend.
Maybe you’ve been working on a huge project all day, and you’ve only got one workstation. You may want to save all your rendering until later, perhaps overnight, when you’re not actually using the workstation. That way, your computer is being used 24 hours a day to it’s fullest potential.