Production updates
on June 10th, 2011, by TonLots of things keep happening all the time with Sintel and the crew! Here’s a list of bullet points with highlights.
-
Sintel selected for Siggraph Animation Festival.
Out of over 1000 submissions, 60 entries were honoured. It’s for our open movie projects a first timer, both ED and BBB didn’t make it… 🙂 -
Blender Foundation booth at Siggraph tradeshow
At least Colin, Nathan and me will be there. I hope we can afford to fly in other team members… t.b.a.
Note we also have a Birds of a Feather event at Siggraph with Sintel presentation. -
New download page
Pablo re-edited the download section, it also has newly encoded versions based on the downsized 4k 16 bits color files made Mathias Linden (thanks!). You can also find all 40 subtitle languages there now. -
Blu-ray ISO and 4k mkv file available
Mathias Linden also encoded us these versions, test these here: http://download.blender.org/durian/movies/ -
Festival screenings
I do my best to keep the agenda updated, Sintel remains popular at many festivals world wide!
And personal highlights for crew members:
- Colin Levy has been recruited by Pixar, he has a 1 year contract as “Camera & Staging Resident”
- Beorn Leonard is being flied in to Sydney, he’ll become animator on Happy Feet 2, Dr D studios
- William Reynish has been accepted on the famous Danish Film School as an animation director student.
- Dolf Veenvliet launched a crowd-funding campaign for his future fossils Entoforms.
- Ben Dansie now works for MonkeyStack studio,
- Jean-Sebastien Guillemette realized  CGI for the series www.shedmtl.com
- Lee Salvemeni launched new character training at his CGMasters site
- David Revoy and Angela Guenette created awesome Blender training dvds.
- Pablo Vazquez is hanging out here in Amsterdam, will work on new training dvd too.
And Campbell, Brecht and me are still frantically trying to get Blender more bugfree 🙂
Thanks,
-Ton-
June 10th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
nice to know that everyone is doing well. 🙂 🙂
congrats on Siggraph to durian team and the whole community. 🙂
and also wondering wat Pablo will come out with….
June 10th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Congrats to everyone, Colin at Pixar… Wow!
I’ve been slipping with my bug reporting lately, so I’ll have to pull finger 🙂
Again guys, awesome job!
June 10th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
good to hear that!
June 10th, 2011 at 4:16 pm
I already knew Sintel would bring Colin a great future career, but who would’ve ever thought he would make to the one and only Pixar?
But now I think about it I can say: It’s logical! Sintel’s cinematography is simply brilliant, every shot makes sense!
Only thing that’s a pity is that Pixar is a very closed company, I think you’re not even allowed to say what software they’re using.
But nevertheless I hope Colin will keep us posted about how things are going in his cinematic life.
It’s great to read what opportunities the Durian project has brought to many of its artists, Ton can be proud of so much more than just Blender and its projects, it goes beyond that!
Heck, even I can be proud of something:
I can say I know someone in person who works at Pixar!
But before Colin goes to Pixar, we first can enjoy his meisterwerke ”The Secret Number” which I’m very much looking forward to!
To all Ladies and Gentlemen of Durian: It’s been great to follow the project, saw it being projected on the big silverscreen, to meet you, to spread the word about Sintel, to… just name it!
I think at that cosy shop on the Entrepotdok something magical happened!
I don’t really know how to conclude this post, but let me say: ”Sintel is here to stay and found its way!”
Thank you all very much and let’s see what the future brings us!
June 10th, 2011 at 5:20 pm
But what happened to Nathan?!? :O
June 10th, 2011 at 5:23 pm
and who is jik….oh wait its me making a typo on my own name…still, What about Nathan?!?
June 10th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Nathan is doing great, freelancing work mostly. 🙂
June 10th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
@jikz:
I’m doing well! Most of the interesting things I am working on right now are hush-hush for the moment, so cannot be announced. But as Ton says, I am continuing to work as a freelancer, which is working out well for me. 🙂
June 10th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
Yay new download page! 😀
And Colin! :O Congrats greatly! An awesome position, and at Pixar!!!
Project Durian has shown its quality through all these great people! 😀
June 10th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Sincere congrats to the team on all these achievements !
Great to see Blender related artists being successful in the industry 🙂
And as always many thanks to the blender devs for making all that magic available for just everyone !
June 11th, 2011 at 2:05 am
Congrats to those getting envious positions.
Blender users going to work at Pixar and on Happy Feet 2 can only help to get more artists helping on the next foundation film.
Works as a good selling point to get people to start using blender too.
June 13th, 2011 at 7:57 am
Well… What can I say? Darn, I’m ecstatically excited! If I had only a hundred thumbs, I’d raise them all to BF and all who was involved, but for now, it’s a two thumbs up!
Congratulations, everyone!
-Reyn
“Keep moving forward.” -Walt Disney
June 14th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Wow, great to hear that everyone, and the movie too, is doing so well. Thank you for everything guys!
June 14th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Is there anyone here in the states that has a Blu-Ray burner that would be willing to burn me a copy off the iso? I’ll pay for the media and shipping. If so, just send me an email to rvbtucker at gmail.com
June 14th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
You can burn the BluRay Image to DVD as its only 1.4GB in size and it should be recognized. But the BluRay Image is not tested (at least not by me), so I don’t know if it even works at all. If you try it, please report if it worked.
June 15th, 2011 at 8:20 am
There a different theories of what peak a bd5 (blu-ray image on dvd5) can handle but a max peak of 28mbit (vbv 14000/14000) is on the save side. The Blu-Ray of Sintel has many peaks that go beyond that so it may be that your Blu-Ray player can’t keep up. You should test it and like Mathias said plz report back.
June 15th, 2011 at 8:43 am
Oh man… thanks Robbert. Youre right, I had the 14000 vbv Settings in the settings, but at the last testing before encoding I changed them back to 40k. I will encode a new version and upload it again. Sorry for the screw up and thanks for noticing.
June 24th, 2011 at 4:15 pm
I hate to complain, but the aspect ratio is broken on the bluray iso. The original (1:2.35 I guess) is streched to 16:9 instead of being letterboxed.
June 24th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Oh dear… your absolutely right Belgabor. I don’t have any BluRay hardware or software, so I wasn’t able to test it. I just encoded the stream and used a free tool to mux it to BluRay. I forgot about the fixed aspect ratio of BluRays.
Let me see when I have time to fix it.
June 30th, 2011 at 11:21 pm
Yes, please fix the bluray aspect ratio. Viewing Sintel in HD on my TV will be a treat.
July 10th, 2011 at 4:01 am
Mathias, I’m sorry to bug but are you going to encode a new version? The site shows that the file was updated on the 30th, but this one still has the aspect ratio problem.
July 12th, 2011 at 1:06 am
Alex, I just started the new BD5 encode. I think it will be available in the next day or two.
July 13th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
I updated the BluRay ISO, here is the download:
http://www.multiupload.com/1PNK1BFMQE
I’m uploading to the Blender FTP right now, but it may take some time for Ton to move the file.
I think I fixed the aspect ratio problem.
About the bitrate, I didn’t find anything usefull about bitrate VBV restrictions for BD5. So I assumed, every player should at least be able to read at 2x DVD speed, which equals 22Mbit/s. So I encoded the video with vbv-bufsize of 20Mbit/s. Please report back, if your player shows stuttering with this encode.
July 14th, 2011 at 4:33 pm
The files are now also available at the blender site:
http://download.blender.org/durian/movies/
July 21st, 2011 at 11:40 pm
Nice work, AR is fine now. It also played without problems on my hardware player, even off an old DVD+RW media.
Thanks a lot =)