Best animations quality/how to get it.

Hi all.

I have recent startet with some animation project. When i make test renders i never look like Sintel and others pro animations movies.

I am using cycles, Camera is super 35 film preset, render as png. first (HDTV1080) preset after alle image is render i make it to a H.264 with the same preset. And i still dont get the clear animations im looking for.

So here is the question. Do i need to pump up the sampels to insane numbers? use Blender internal render, if that the case a link to tutorial would be nice. or is im doing anything else wrong?

any help will be apriciated.

/Michael.

There are many factors to take into consideration when making quality animation. From the processing power of your PC to the artistic skills to the lighting of the scenes. However, when it really boils down to it, it’s mostly depends on how complex the scene is going to be. The more complex the animation, the more processing power you are going to need. You can create animations using any rendering engine. The bottom line is you have to try and see what works best for you. I should know because I’ve been the same situation with my project for over 6 years and I have yet to produce a final production product. Also a team wouldn’t hurt.

thank you Xero. At the moment im just playing around and learning to use the tools. The thing i was going for in this question was really how to get the best video quality, the tecnical settings and wich format to use.

OH! Well the best Video quality would be 1920x1080(Standard) and the format to render it in for the final version would be in H.264 which is the most universal format for sites like Vimeo, YouTube, and Facebook.

oh… i guss i just have to up the samples, i did my test with 500 samp. how many samples do you use on the final render??

If you want to achieve a high standard look of your animation, on top of having a brilliant scene render, you probably have to do some compositing enhancements to the footage you rendered out (colour grading, combining layers, motion blur, …).
So with this in mind I would render the animation / layers as sequences of single pictures (EXR or PNG which has non-destructive compression), which then can be put together, tweaked and enhanced in the Compositor (this way no compression loss already here).
For the final output I usually render out the animation as a bunch of single images (again). From these I now can make whatever is demanded from the end medium (ProRes, H264, DCP,…), be it from Blender, Premiere, FinalCut,…
This way the footage only gets compressed once.

+1 Mobimo
Always archive and or export PNG seq. This way one corrupt frame does not tube the rest…PNG out. (475 frames, computer gets to 455 and crashes on export) Would you rather re export all again or now instruct an export of 455-475… then add those to the other folder with 1-454 frames intact.

All NLE’s use PNG’s to later add motion blur and all kinds of lateral comes with it. Where you can then denote Mbps stream or codec for where or what is played back on.