Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Do you recall Sintel’s line “Hey.. we are almost done.. shh.. sit still!” from the sneak peek video we posted long ago? 🙂

We’re working to get this out as soon as possible.

Join the waiting and after party with the Durian crew!

We’ll be at #blenderdurian on IRC (FreeNode).
You can also join the party via: http://graphicall.org/sintel/

Thank you all community, you’re awesome. Let’s raise the hype!
An extremely excited Durian Team 🙂

Hi all,

Just got a note that the 450 seats for the premiere all have been sold or reserved. I don’t know if you can get on a waiting list there… best is to contact the festival itself then. Alternative is to attend the thursday evening screening.

-Ton-

Well you never know… Amsterdam can flood or so. But we target at next week thursday for spreading our film online! Work on the DVD with the loads of extras still continues, when this goes to be duplicated I’ll notify you!

Official press release can be loaded here.

It’ll be epic!

-Ton-

double awesomeness all the way

We can haz poster? yes we can haz!

Ton, Soenke and I just came back from checking a proof print of the poster, and it looks marvelous!, bright, great contrast, nice subtle colors, not extremely saturated, right like on the screen.

The process of making this poster started months ago with some ideas David had, then we had this task of getting the actual movie done and forgot about the poster, so the actual work started last week.

Concept by David, characters posed by Lee, lighting/render by me, and amazing paint over by David! 😀

Keep reading to know more about the making of!

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And now it’s official, the new 3D world october edition is available throughout Europe. USA and other countries follow a month later I heard.

This issue has 6 pages of Sintel graphics, screenies and interviews with the crew. There’s even a Big Buck Bunny mention on the list of “memorable shorts made in past years”!

The “Return of Blender” has been choosen by 3D World as a good cover slogan I guess. We all know we were never gone, but we we’ve been very busy indeed! 🙂

-Ton-

As you remember, we give a special thanks to people who helped realizing Sintel by purchasing the DVD set in advance. The film scroll credit was for those who pre-paid before Sept 16, 2009. The other pre-paid orders will be mentioned on the DVDs itself, in a special “thank you” section.

Here is the DVD list:
/dvd-only-sponsor-credit/

Please check? Thanks!

-Ton-

Hey all, Beorn here, the animator dude who’s been roped into the thankless task of encoding the movie into various formats. (Actually I was crazy enough to volunteer!)
Fortunately the DivX files will be encoded by the good people at DivX, who are actual professionals (as opposed to a forum trawling script kiddie like me).
Despite what Ton has said on this blog before, this is not my area of expertise. I’m really learning as I go and would very much appreciate any advice from the community. I just thought I’d share my current progress and ask for any suggestions on how to improve things.

The goal:
To provide h264 quicktimes and ogg video files in 480p, 720p and 1080p, with subtitles and surround sound (except the 480p versions which will be stereo), and to encode the video for the dvds (NTSC and PAL versions).

I’ve been supplied:

• directory of PNG files, 2048×872 in size
• a stereo wav file
• an audio only quicktime file with 5.1 sound in the aac codec. (there is also an ac3 file for the dvd)
• a directory of subtitle files in .srt format

Please note: I’ve compiled my own versions of ffmpeg and x264 in order to make the quicktimes.

My current issues:

• I haven’t been able to add 5.1 audio to the ogg files in any other codec than flac, which means the files are HUGE.
• The ogg video files are about 3x bigger than the quicktimes, even with stereo sound
• I haven’t been able to add subtitles to the quicktimes.
• I’m using mplayer to do the scaling/cropping/letterboxing, but it keeps crashing on the 1080 versions when trying to crop on the fly. Notice the hack I’ve included on those versions; making cropped copies of the PNGs, encoding them and deleting them. It works, but it’s… inelegant.

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