Overman's Moviestorm Render Workflow

Here is the workflow I used to get from Moviestorm render to finished product on the ad absurdum series, and am very pleased with the results.

1) Render out of Moviestorm at Ultra / 1280x720.

2) Extract audio tracks from these Moviestorm files. (see this thread)

3) Edit in Sony Vegas. I turn OFF the motion blur on every video track, which helps keep the image clean. Complete all post production (incl. soundtrack) using that and other tools as needed.

4) Render out of Sony Vegas as 800x450 (16:9) uncompressed AVI, uncompressed PCM audio. 1.0 Pixel Aspect Ratio; Field Order: None (Progressive). Highest Quality settings wherever indicated. Default keyframe settings. 25 fps.

Then, the versions:
A) DivX AVI - I feed the uncompressed 800x450 avi into the DivX Converter, and render out at that same resolution / framerate, keeping default settings except that I up the audio ceiling to 128kbps. This yields a significant improvement in audio quality vs. the default settings.

Working Example of A: (link)

B) QuickTime - I open the uncompressed 800x450 avi in QuickTime Pro, and render out a .mov at that same resolution / framerate using H.264 codec, AAC 44.1kHz audio, readied for Fast Internet Streaming.

Working Example of B: (download)

C) Flash - for Blip.tv and for my own website; I open the uncompressed 800x450 avi in QuickTime Pro, and render out a .flv (Flash Video) 720x405 (16:9) / 25fps file using the Flix Exporter plugin; 700-800kbps overall bitrate with 160kbps of that used by audio. The reason I use a smaller resolution here is purely practical; it fits better on my web page.

Working Example of C: (link)

D) QuickTime for Moviestorm Website - Same settings as B above (QuickTime), except I render at a custom resolution of 426x240. (For some reason, when I'd render out at the recommended 427 pixels wide, I noticed a one-pixel-wide green line at the right side of my video image; perhaps a rounding issue? So I did 426x240 and it went away.

Working Example of D: (link - you'll have to download it until the viewer issues are resolved)

E) For YouTube - Same settings as A above (DivX), except I change the resolution to 320x180. Note that YouTube states that it wants 320x240, but if you upload 320x180, it will automatically pad the video with letterbox so it works out fine.

Working Example of E: (link)

For me, the significant part of the equation is that I always create that intermediary uncompressed avi (at the highest needed resolution) before I go creating my distribution renders. In my experience, when I've tried to force the various other resolutions within Vegas, alignment issues with video layers can arise, and it just doesn't seem to resize at very good quality. QuickTime Pro and the DivX Converter seem to be very good at resizing without much degradation in quality, so I let those tools do that job. I don't do WMV files anymore, but if I did I'd follow the same principle: let Windows Media Encoder handle the resizing (if any).

I'm very interested to hear from others who are happy with their video quality, what are you doing to achieve it?

Overman! You are a prince among men. This is incredibly helpful. Thank you so much for this tutorial.

I second that - this is an incredibly helpful and well-written post. Hope you don't mind if I sticky the thread, so we can all easily bask in the machinima-greatness that is Overman

.

Ah, I'm far from having achieved machinima greatness. But I'm happy to help however I can. Sticky away!

Darned helpful! Thanks!

Overman wrote:

Ah, I'm far from having achieved machinima greatness.

Don't make me put this to a vote, Phil

If I say you're great, then you're great. I have admin privs on this forum. My word is law.

Excellent work! This is very very helpful.

Thanks

Thanks overman your a legend, this is really a great help I have my video sizes all over the place, now I can bring them under control.

Regards
Davidwww

P.S. I spent a lot of time watching the movies on your site last night and my favorite is Male Restroom Etiquette, I was killing myself laughing, if any of you have not watched it yet, especially the male members of MS, its a must.

Thanks *** VERY MUCH *** for this!

It completely answers the question I tried to ask before about video formats.

I'm looking at a quad-core system.

What kind of render times are you getting from your system?

joel

Is it possible to output a Moviestorm animation file that's 29.97 or 30 fps? Or is it just PAL? If it is just PAL, is there a plan to create an NTSC version down the road?

This isn't really noticeable for short projects, but it may become important later to North American projects with a longer running time.

gishzida wrote:

What kind of render times are you getting from your system?

Great question, I haven't yet timed it. I've got some renders I'll be doing tomorrow, I'll plan on clocking them and get back to you.

RiViT wrote:

Is it possible to output a Moviestorm animation file that's 29.97 or 30 fps? Or is it just PAL? If it is just PAL, is there a plan to create an NTSC version down the road?

In its current state, it only outputs 25fps (PAL), but a new render system is coming before too long and I am 99% certain it will include not only NTSC framerates but support for other codecs as well.

I finally have a rough draft of my music video but I got problems... not that one... this one: I just tried to save uncompressed and quickly exceeded 4 Gb of space and the Vegas render failed. So tell me what am I doing wrong here?

[EDIT]

One other question: In your workflow you say you open the avi in QTPro and render it for QT... Why? You can render QT in Vegas if QTP is installed. Is there a render time difference doing it in QTP vs. Vegas?

[/EDIT]

1) 4GB filx size limit. This is a limitation of hard drives formatted as FAT16 or FAT32. In order to be able to exceed this size, you need to write to a disk drive formatted as NTFS. Windows should have a way to convert the drive without losing data, though a backup beforehand is never a bad idea.

2) QTPro out of Vegas. I don't know if there's a render time difference, it just fits better with my workflow to do one render out of Vegas and let other programs do phase 2. I've noticed odd anomalies when switching render sizes / etc. in Vegas, so I prefer to get one MASTER (the uncompressed .avi) out of Vegas, then I am ensured that all subsequent renders are coming from exactly the same source.

Overman wrote:

In its current state, it only outputs 25fps (PAL), but a new render system is coming before too long and I am 99% certain it will include not only NTSC framerates but support for other codecs as well.

That would be very good news. Thanks.

Overman wrote:

1) 4GB filx size limit. This is a limitation of hard drives formatted as FAT16 or FAT32. In order to be able to exceed this size, you need to write to a disk drive formatted as NTFS. Windows should have a way to convert the drive without losing data, though a backup beforehand is never a bad idea.

What kind of uncompressed files sizes are you getting?

[EDIT]
One other thing I'm not sure that using uncompressed video actually helps any as the source video is not uncompressed.

I looked at the properties of one of the output files from one of the scenes I created:

Frame Rate: 25FPS
Data Rate: 1575kbps
24 bit
MS-MPEG4 V2 [FFDS] compression.

I'm not to video savvy but what I learned in 'the MP3 era' was the less you messed with compressing / decompressing an audio file the less likely you were to create audio "artifacts" which did not exist in the master WAV audio file.

Since MovieStorm gives is a compressed output the best that can be hoped for is to create the "master cut / edit" of the files in the same format as noted above. I think this would be less likely to give you "odd' results... then from this master cut create all of the separate variants

[/EDIT]