Nearly finished!
on August 29th, 2010, by Ton
Dolf spent the last two weeks here on a wonderful film credits, based on David’s concept art, which added another few minutes to the film! Pablo and Soenke keep trying to make shots even more awesome, but that also has to stop soon now. The next week we can still do last re-renders, spend time on a final color grade session, and then at sept 7 deliver the final files to the film lab. The final Dolby master then has been scheduled on the 9th, with the first film print – for the premiere on NFF – ready tuesday 14th.
Film stats:
– Film itself: 12:24
– Credits: 2:24
Total length: 14 minutes 48 seconds, or 888 seconds!
Who could have imagined! We started with a target of of “6-8 minutes” you know. 🙂 And even after the finals screening, Colin and Beorn managed to add 4 seconds to the film!
Next on the todo: get the DVD mastering started up, we already have a menu loop for it, a quad-split-screen version with storyboard-layout-opengl-final and will add a number of fun deleted scenes! Ali has the documentary finished (60 minutes). Oh, and we didn’t forget the tutorials, our loyal team members are working from home on it now. 🙂
-Ton-
(BTW: I’ve updated the About pages with proper history info and added the missing artist’s mugshots, this in preparation of press releases and for magazines etc.)
(BTW2: the date for the actual online release has to be pinned down still. Aim is to do this within a week after the premiere. Also depends on how fast we can get the DVDs done. News on this will follow)
August 29th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Woohooo!! It’s getting close! I can’t wait to see it!! It will be released on the web shortly after the premiere?
August 29th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Nice!
At what dubbing stage will the theatrical mix and Dolby mastering be done?
And are you satisfied with the test print that Cineco made?
August 29th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
realy gret job ,.,
No PIXAR NO Disney THE KING OF 3D Animation is Sintel Team but
when we can see the movie online ,, XP
August 29th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Wow, longing for the DVD. Any symbolics in 888 seconds? 😉
August 29th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
I’ve added a BTW2 remark about online release.
J: we still have to wait for Cineco’s test run. Jan might use a studio in Hamburg for the theatrical mix, the Dolby master then is a matter of straight conversion.
Patrox: 888 is the chinese number of Good Fortune!
August 29th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Isn’t Dell a kind of sponsor? I thought they lend you a couple of servers for rendering.
August 29th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
They have a credit in a different section.
August 29th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
No one can ever tell you guys how much we appreciate all of your hard work. 🙂 But we try!
Thanks for all your hard work, guys!
August 29th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
What D said! 😀
August 29th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
thanks for all this effort, this kind of projects are amazing.
August 29th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
looks like you made nice credits… you know… i love good credits 🙂
August 29th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Ton,
assuming you’ll be uploading the finished film to YouTube on release?
Hoping that it’s available to stream from YouTube in webm format, Blender foundation has always made great quality demo material!
Can’t wait for my discs 😀
Regards,
August 29th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Arghhhhhhhh!!!!!!! film credits with David’s concept arts is fantasticly beautiful! 😀
It looks so professional, congratulations!
Really guys, can’t wait to have the DVD delivered in my mailbox… 🙂
What I can’t still catch from your words is: will DVD be released “before” online release? I hope so…
p.s.
have you heard about a team america too, guys………
What if we can have chance to have a look at their work too? 😉
August 29th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
@John Drinkwater:
You can be sure that the online release will be accompanied by an offical upload of the film on the BlenderFoundation channel, isn’t it?
August 29th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
In chinese, 8 has a similar pronunciation as “prosper”. Thus “888” is well, believe it or not, actually quite a lucky sounding number. 😉
August 29th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Just as 666 has traditionally been considered the “Number of the Beast” (ie Devil), a less known fact is that in the same system 888 is considered the “Number of God”.
No matter how you look at it, it sounds like Sintels release is going to be impressive!
August 29th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Could we have an idea of how many tutorials there will be on the DVD and what they will cover ?
August 29th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Excellent job on the credits Dolf! Credit sequences like those can make a movie that much more epic, like in The Return of the King, for example. *eagerly continues to wait for the DVD and online release*
August 29th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
yeeeahhhh, I can’t wait to have the dvd’s in my hands! congratulations guys, I know it will be awosome!!
August 29th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
SnakeDoc: I expect work from each artist about his/her work, howtos and the like.
August 29th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
hello
i can’t wait to see the film in my mailbox!
i wish there are nice tuts on the DVD too.
August 29th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
@Ton:
When can we expect the poster?
August 29th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
I think there’s a typo in the post. You said you were shooting for a range of “6-8 minutes”, which is negative two minutes. Instead your movie is 14 minutes, which is 6+8. Nice!
😉
August 29th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
12 minutes of film? Gorgeous!!
August 29th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Michael Tiemann: It’s not a minus sign though, it’s a hyphen, that’s also wrong. 😛 It needs to be a dash 😛 😉
August 29th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Sorry, I meant it has to be an en dash.
August 29th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
It’s getting close with every day… Durian ftw !
August 29th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
Great job well done Durian team. I cannot wait for the DVD. But Ton how about releasing the t-shirts early to generate some early revenue and get more buz going. It takes a couple of weeks to get something from the blender institute to the USA.
August 29th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
Mhm but where is Joe Eagar in the about list? 🙂
August 30th, 2010 at 12:32 am
I’m extremely excited about seeing the film. But one more thing that I’m very excited about too is the documentary, will it also be released for free? When?
August 30th, 2010 at 9:25 am
more trivia: Sintel is 888 seconds long.
888 * 24 (fps) = 21312 frames in total… palindrome!
(btw 24 is three times eight: 8+8+8 ! )
And “2131” is one of the team member’s house number! whose bedroom is on the 2nd floor! so is 2131/2 ! (ok maybe pushing it too much)
August 30th, 2010 at 10:15 am
freaky!
August 30th, 2010 at 10:39 am
“ok maybe pushing it too much”
Yep. The movie is in 23.81 fps… right? 😛
August 30th, 2010 at 10:39 am
But 12:24 is amazing. Almost as long as Morkramia.
August 30th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
So happy that this is all coming together. And I thought that you didn’t have time for tutorials, can you guys get any better?
August 30th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
woohoo!! I’m getting very excited!!
August 30th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Very nice 😀
Btw.
I believe its “CoreEL Technologies” 😉
August 30th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Lol Pablo 😀
This obviously is a very 8-heavy production 🙂
Must be an indicator for the infinite awesomeness 😀
Beautiful credits screen 🙂
Btw: @ Btw: at the about page, one of the photos (Jeremy) seems to be broken. To me at least 🙂
August 30th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
@Grandmaster B:
You’re right!
Dolf, laat ‘t bakkie maar weer pruttelen! 😛
August 30th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
@kram1032:
Weird, works fine here!
August 30th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I would like to buy the DVD but I live in South America, Argentina.
It is possible to get the DVD here in my contry?.
Greetings!!! 🙂
August 30th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
I can’t believe it’s actually happening, it’s almost finished!
August 30th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
DivX is a Premium Sponsor? I just hope none of their tools are used in compressing the movie. It would be great, if the DVD featured a good quality h264 (x264) compressed movie and I wouldn’t have to download a better version, but my hopes are not that high…
I still don’t understand, why you didn’t want advices from the community on that part…
August 30th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
DivX uses h264 compression now, just download the trailer!
August 31st, 2010 at 1:24 am
Rha, stop teasing us ! I can’t sleep… I’m even spending time complaining about not being able to sleep instead of sleeping.
Seriously, I think I can wait three weeks after all those months of following the blog.
When is the next film or game planned to begin ? :=°
August 31st, 2010 at 5:33 am
@ Deubeuliou; if you can’t sleep waiting for this one to come out in 3 weeks, you are going to torture yourself to death waiting for ones that haven’t even started yet.
I feel your pain!
I actually have found it quite fun watching the SVN updates on the sidebar menu of late. There have been quite a lot of fixes, additions and the likes happening, just be careful, if its over done, then the outcome could suffer.
Though I that is just my cautious side coming out.
Great to hear everything coming along fine.
August 31st, 2010 at 10:55 am
@J. I know, but h264 is no guarantee for quality. There are shit encoders (everything that advertises with GPU or x-times faster then y) there are mediocre encoders (DivX, Nero, some others) and there are good encoders (x264 and very expensive codecs). But even x264 is no guarant for quality, youtube uses x264 and everyone knows how that turns out.
I asked them to let a professional (not me) handle the job, but Ton didn’t agree to the (free) offer…
August 31st, 2010 at 11:12 am
@ so excited to think what the future holds for next blender open movie project. From what i know Ton named another project which involved, from what i understood it to be live capture and motion tracking with blender.
cant wait for that and the current movie release
August 31st, 2010 at 12:22 pm
hetors: of course we deliver in all of South America!
Mathias: If you look up at the sponsors page you can see the amount DivX contributed, that was of great help. We only have to make (their encoded) files available here. Additionally to that we encode various versions ourselves, including oggs. Our animator Beorn will help with it, and he’s a professional in this area. I would never accept sponsoring from anyone who will limit our free and open project.
August 31st, 2010 at 12:31 pm
J.: Yup, you’re right, the image works again. Probably was an unidentified problem on my end 🙂
August 31st, 2010 at 12:49 pm
@Mathias:
x264 is a mp4 ?
So its not the encoder setting the quality but the bandwidth given per sec.
On the other hand is the encoder known whats going on in the scene it can encode better for that scene. Sometimes its better to have nice dark info and sometimes its better to have good move info. Some companies go as far as setting encode values per scene. Or at least have a timecode run next to the movie to encode to presets for that scene.
Also, very good encoders can use bandwidth on areas of the image.
( You can try this in photoshop’s “save for web” and select the alpha channel to determen where to use the bandwidth ). So its possible to encode blurry backgrounds not very well, and have extra data for eyes and faces.
I dont think Sintel will get this kind of encoding.
August 31st, 2010 at 1:23 pm
And if you’re not pleased with the results of DivX and Beorn, you can take the PNG’s and make your own encode. 😉
August 31st, 2010 at 2:29 pm
I just looked again to the DivX encode of the trailer and I must say: Almost perfect!
There’s nothing to worry about, these guys know exactly what they’re doing.
August 31st, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Great Ton, thank you very much for the reply.
I´ll buy the DVDs.
Greetings!!.
August 31st, 2010 at 5:12 pm
The store page needs to be updated, it still says 6-8mins.
August 31st, 2010 at 6:53 pm
i’ve just ordered the dvd today. after knowing you used one of my animations (curious which one ^^) i had to buy it on dvd.
clever guys… clever 😛
August 31st, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Awesome Credits. I really can’t wait to see this film.
August 31st, 2010 at 11:12 pm
I’m crossing my fingers for the next project to be a Space Opera with a little bit of Cyberpunk 🙂 …I miss those.
September 1st, 2010 at 12:30 am
@joeri67 Everything you said, x264 does automatically – and a lot more. There is little to gain from manual per scene adjustments. But if you want, you can do that with x264 too.
@J. Encoding it myself was what I wanted to avoid, because I was hoping to get the best version on the DVD. And sure, the trailer wasn’t bad, but surely improvable.
@Ton I just hope youre right. It won’t be as craptastic as the BBB Quicktime was for sure. So for the quick watch it will be more then ok. Only the DVD will tell if I need an extra manual encoded version…
September 1st, 2010 at 12:43 am
Just a quick note: There are enough badly encoded BluRays out there…
September 1st, 2010 at 6:21 am
i know about figure “88” but “888” that’s more powerful.
the base is “0”, i figure about max ability of men power is “88”
<>
So Sintel movie’s length is 888 sec that’s figuring max from a team.
Great job Durians…..
– Aman
September 1st, 2010 at 11:10 am
@rogper: yeah, space opera… 🙂
Will the word “Gold” in the credits turn to gold as it scrolls up the screen?
September 1st, 2010 at 6:24 pm
@yoff:
” Will the word “Gold” in the credits turn to gold as it scrolls up the screen? ”
Yes and it will drop off the screen as a real bar of gold to pay for the next movie 🙂
September 1st, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I don’t think so, it seems it aren’t rolling credits, but fading still text.
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:47 am
in Japan we say
OTSUKARESAMA DESHITA !!
when you finish the work.
🙂
September 2nd, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Here we just say: Finally, it’s done! 😛
September 2nd, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I thought it would be Phew!, Who’s round is it, so whats the next project Ton?, Well that wasn’t so bad was it?……..et al
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:01 pm
J: this is the scroll.
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Oooh, okay, my mistake. 😛
Already fixed the Coreel error? Has to be CoreEL. 😉
September 3rd, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Maybe it’s been suggested before, but it would be pretty cool if some of the more technical blog entries would be on the DVD, like Jan Morgensterns blog on audio. Some of the blog entries are really, really interesting.
Good luck with finalizing it all !
September 4th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
I wish you all every success with Sintel. Ton I thank you for creating Blender and making all this possible – you are amazing. We have told Lee that we would like to meet you one day.
September 6th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
when its finally released would be be able to distribute the dvd. would be interesting if we could have the dvd covers and cd prints aswell.
September 6th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
nawabz: as for our previous projects we will release everything free and open, except the dvd cover and the dvd print. I like it a lot to give our loyal sponsors at least something a little bit unique. They will a true original, to thank them for the trust and sponsoring. Apart from that, the cover has Blender and BF logos too, which is limited to official blender.org projects.
September 6th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Can’t wait! 😛
It’s been more than a week since the last blog post, so when will you post something? No time due to tomorrow’s ”Cineco deadline”?
Already seen the test print?
September 6th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Ton wrote: as for our previous projects we will release everything free and open.
Great is this including the music sounds projects, which format ?
September 6th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Gah, I can’t wait that long to see the movie!
September 7th, 2010 at 10:42 am
@anton:
The Audio Part was done one non-Opensource-software, using non-Opensource-sampleinstruments… so i bet like the previous OpenMovies you dont get what you asked for. But i hope there will be a Score-only Pack again, like they did for Orange and Peach..
for example:
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/complete-score-available-for-download/
September 7th, 2010 at 11:47 am
I think the quality of the movie is for 50% determined by music.
Sintel has great soundtracks but they are closed source not a problem for me
I guess there is a good reason for.
Maybe dolby although a good alternative is vorbis.
Can’t wait to get the Sintel DVD
Greetings.
September 7th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Can’t wait to see what kind of great work has come out of an open movie project once again! Congrats to the entire team, and I only wish I could make it to the premiere!