Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

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-

1st present

I wanted to offer in this special evening a little gift , for your help and your support around Sintel and Chaos&Evolutions during this year 2010. Thanks again , and here is a timelapse commented of my watercolor technic with Mypaint and Gimp-painter.

Digital Watercolor with Mypaint 0.9 and Gimp-painter from David REVOY on Vimeo.

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Hi everyone! Lee here.

With sintel complete, I had some time to put together my 2010 animation reel and can’t wait to begin a new adventure! I’m now putting myself out there as a free agent for freelance or emplyment at a company. Traveling, no worries!

My main skills lie in animation (In any package), but I can operate well as a Blender generalist. I must say I’m really excited to see what 2011 holds and all the fun projects and job opportunities out there. If you would like to get in touch with me, you can do so at [email protected] . I also have a recent CV and references on the ready.

‘Epic’ Animation Reel 2010 – Lee Salvemini from Lee Salvemini on Vimeo.

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Looks awesome!, but..

4K is not a bed of roses, everything is (obviously) bigger and heavier to handle, previz, space on disk, moving files on the server, and so on. Blender suffers this internally as well.

Rendering

On the render side (not compositing), the Blender internal did great, you’d expect twice the render time, but some shots did much less than that, I didn’t feel much difference locally, neither our farm did (bunch of quad i7 and some Xeon Octacores), but compositing is another story…

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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-

Hi all,

Of course we knew our girl Sintel has travelled far & wide… but as far as Indonesia?

Check out the ‘rip-off illegal DVD’ a friend of mine found in a DVD shop in Bali. Unfortunately they didn’t get all the names of the team quite right… but as my friend said: ‘what bigger compliment than an illegal copy of your film?’ 😉

Hope all of you enjoy the genuine Sintel DVD, and thanks for all the positive feedback!

x Esther

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation.

This making of/documentary shows the stages of the production from November 2009 until July 2010.

As a making of the processes from concept to finished product are explained, as documentary the feel of an international team and the personalities of the artists are depicted.

Ali Boubred