Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Since the previous post we just couldn’t stop trying to fix yet another few errors. 🙂 It’s still not totally flawless, some of the textures & material settings were too complex to easily debug or fix.

The 4k files are being copied to USB drives to be shipped to our sponsors. The 16 bits 4k frames are 650 GB in total… not fun for a mirror, nor for uploading either. Need to solve this still, but maybe xiph.org wants to try to host it. Will keep you updated on it. The 4k film will at least show prominently on NAB Las Vegas this year.

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The blog is quiet, but there’s still work on Sintel being done here.

In the past two-and-a-half months we worked on getting the film fully re-rendered in 4k, in a resolution of 4096×1744 pixels. When Pablo left back home to Patagonia mid December, Dolf took over his job for the final-final tweaks and solving some render errors. Yesterday he sent the last tweaks to the farm, and we might have today a working version!

Last week I watched with Dolf the full re-render in 1920 wide downscaled png playback, and the detail in the images is just amazing! It also pointed me to the fact our mp4 files here are quite heavily compressed… we should replace them with 800M versions or so.

In the next days (within a week) we aim at publishing the 1920 (“HD”) wide pngs online, so people can play around with compression setups. Please post links to movie files here (ogg, mp4) if you have good ones, then we update it on our mirrors too!

We will also output an original 4k version in 3×16 bits DPX format. That’s been sent on USB drive to our sponsors first, but I know they won’t mind us sharing it. Still would be awesome to have a couple of public screenings of the 4k version announced. Stay tuned!

I do know that on NAB Las Vegas Sintel (in 4k) will get prominently covered. 🙂

Another update: Jan Morgenstern made a soundtrack without voices, for dubbing pleasure:
http://download.blender.org/durian/movies/sintel-m+e-st.flac (71 MB FLAC, 48 kHz 16 bit Stereo)

Laters,

-Ton-

Since mid October we’re keeping our office warm with rendering 4k frames. Pablo and Dolf have been cleaning some errors and preparing all files for this breathtaking resolution. Some of you might have seen the sneak preview of shots at the Blender Conference, at a gigantic 4k screen!

All of the shots have been rendered now, but we suffer the obvious hair problems and occasional crashes still. Hopefully it’ll be done in a few days: this friday Pablo flies back to sunny and warm Patagonia!

Here you can download 5 random nice images from the farm:
http://download.blender.org/durian/4K_examples.zip

Pablo also collected a list of issues with current .blend files (as on the DVDs) and made a log for how-to rerender the film. Will be posted end of the week as well.

An official premiere for the 4k film has to be finalized still… but soon after all material will become available freely, as usual.

-Ton-

About 250 Sintel posters have been delivered to our office now. They are beautiful quality offset-printed,  in original movie poster size: 27 by 40 inches (approx. 70 x 100 cm). Deserves to get a decent spotlight on your wall!

Posters will be sent in a strong cardboard shipping tube. Due to the non-standard size, shipping costs are relatively high though. This is why we will only charge shipping costs once, also when you order more posters.

More information here in the Blender Store!

-Ton-

Sintel 4 DVD Box Set on the Blender Store

Phew, another milestone met… the four DVD masters were sent yesterday to the printer, luckily still in time for the Blender Conference (*). Expected delivery of the copies is next week friday, we then pack all 3200 orders during the weekend (yeah, that’s going to be fun! Luckily our shop manager Anja prepares this for us excellently).
Special thanks to all team members for making tutorials from home, to Jan Morgenstern for all additional sound and music work (including cleaning up 8 commentary tracks), to Pablo Vazquez for weeks of work on the DVD design and to Joeri Kassenaar for mastering the PAL and NTSC discs. You guys will even get 4 GB extra data, the production files were 12 GB in total, heavily compressed… didn’t fit on one DVD.

Preview: Angela Guenette tutorial on facial poses
Preview: Colin Levy tutorial on setting up render and compositing

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Although Sintel has been released, we will still continue to work on re-rendering the film in 4k format (3840 pixels wide, for digital projection or screens). This is being sponsored by the Amsterdam Cinegrid consortium, and will be available (tentatively) end of 2010.
As last and ultimate target we also would love to be able to deliver the film in stereoscopic format. We believe that an open and free accessible ‘stereo 3d’ film has a great potential to become a worldwide test and evaluation standard. It’s currently even open to deliver this in stereo-4k!

Blender Institute intends to produce this with the highest quality possible, which means that all shots in the film will be carefully (re)designed by an experienced stereographer assisted by experienced Blender artists. We also want to spend considerable time on optimizing and implementing an efficient stereographic editing workflow in Blender (camera tools, integrated render, compositing).

You can e-mail Ton Roosendaal to get further information about this sponsoring opportunity.

-Ton-

Our short animation film now has been published online for everyone to watch and spread! It’s been an exciting moment for our team, and for everyone who as eagerly awaited this moment. We hope you enjoy it!

Here is the Youtube link, file mirrors and torrents.

Next on our todo is wrapping up the 4-dvd box release, NTSC/PAL discs with extras and documentary, and 2 DVD-ROMs with tutorials, and all the data to reproduce the fim entirely. 🙂

-Ton-