TIME TO RENDER

Now everything has been animated it was time to render and then edit it together. So we are not far from the finishing line. Firstly we rendered out our scene's as a Tiff sequence in Maya. We then took those Tiff sequences and rendered them in AfterEffects, this now meant we had a 1080p HD video of our animaiton! The next stage was to put our rendered scenes into Premier so that we could add the sound.

However  we then encountered some problems. The first problem that we came across was that rendered shots did not fit. One of the reasons for this was because we picked a non standard aspect ratio. We did this because it worked better for the client and the purpose of the promo, but this meant that the video did not work in Premier. Another reason for this was codec that we used. We used apple intermediate codec, this worked fine out of AfterEffects and Premier but as soon as we put the video with this codec into those programmes the video would squash. This made our footage look slightly deformed. We tried using other codecs and still had the same problem. But then we asked a fellow colleague and we got told the correct codec that we should be using. So that was that problem sorted.

Due to the fact that we were having this problem Matt decided to edit all of our work together in AfterEffects. This was not ideal and took a lot longer than it would have done in Premier. Due to us editing in AfterEffects we came across another problem. This was that when you add in multiple audio tracks the sound goes slightly out of sync. Another reason why the sound went out of sync was because we forgot to change the default settings in Maya so we animated in 24 frames per second. This meant that when our animations were put into AfterEffects they played differently to the audio. So now we had the major problem of the audio playing fine with the animation in Maya but when putting the audio and animation into AfterEffects they did not match up at all. So both myself and Matt were frantically editing the audio and experimenting in AfterEffects in order to match the animation and the audio back up. We were unable to match them back up exactly how it was in Maya but Matt found a way of stretching the audio so that it fitted, along with some other additional sound effects it works fine now. Its not perfect but it pretty much there.

Now that we had finally sorted out all of renders after the grueling process of re rendering a couple of times, and we had sorted out the other problems that we had. It was now time to render out all of our footage, of course making sure that we used the correct settings and codec etc. This will finally give us our final video. The next stage was to fulfill the broadcast criteria, but we will tackle that tomorrow.